






yiiOpi;it ill 




O' "> ' '^p^ fy C^^ 






^^ a\ 



,^ 



>^' .^^'^H 



% 
^ 



-^^' /^//Z^% 



^O 






-A' 



X^^ 



•J"'^ 
•>^, 









^^ c^ 






.5 



I 



o^ 









#^' 









. '^o 



.Oo 






K^'".^ 



^^^#/l^■ 



'\^ 



-:^,. ,^x 



* S 1 A 









.^- 



% 



Cil$^> .^ 






;.'*:.• 



I 






.■» .^^5:^.^ 



^ . ^ 



■^> 



^^^ 















\* 



/X^ 



'^^ 



v\ 
















^h'- "^C.- v^'' ~l "^ -c. 






7 ■— ' 















\^ 









r 

* .•^- 



V 



<V 







\' 



,^^ -c. 





















0^ 



.0 



A SHORT HISTORY OFTENGLAND 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

The Crimes of England. $i.oo net. 
Heretics. i2mo. $1.50 net. 
Orthodoxy. i2mo. $1.50 net. 
All Things Considered. i2mo. $1.50 

net. 
George Bernard Shaw. An illus- 
trated biography. i2mo. $1.50 net. 

The Ball and the Cross. i2mo. 
$1.30 net. 

The Ballad of the White Horse 

i2mo. $1.25 net. 
The Innocence of Father Brown 

Illustrated. i2mo. $1.30 net. 

The Wisdom of Father Brown 

i2mo. $1.30 net. 

Manalive. i2mo. $1.30 net. 

The Flying Inn. i2mo. $1.30 net. 

Poems. i2mo. $1.25 net. 

The Napoleon of Notting Hill : A 
Romance. With Illustrations by 
Graham Robertson. i2mo. $1.30 net. 

JOHN LANE COMPANY 
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 



A SHORT HISTORY 

of 
ENGLAND 



BY 



G. K. CHESTERTON 

AUTHOR OF "heretics," "ORTHODOXY," 
"THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND," ETC. 



NEW YORK 

JOHN LANE COMPANY 

MCMXVII 



^w^^ 

^%^^ 

^^M^ 



Copjrright, 1917, 
By John Lane Company 



NOV 13- 13! 7 



Press of 

J. J. Little & Ives Cq» 

New Yofk 



g)Q! ^ ^-^CO^B 



CONTENTS 



I. INTRODUCTION 

II. THE PROVINCE OF BRITAIN .... 

III. THE AGE OF LEGENDS 

IV. THE DEFEAT OF THE BARBARIANS 

V. ST. EDWARD AND THE NORMAN KINGS 

VI. THE AGE OF THE CRUSADES 

VII. THE PROBLEM OF THE PLANTAGENETS 

VIII. THE MEANING OF MERRY ENGLAND . 

IX. NATIONALITY AND THE FRENCH WARS 

X. THE WAR OF THE USURPERS . 

XI. THE REBELLION OF THE RICH . 

XII. SPAIN AND THE SCHISM OF NATIONS . 

XIII. THE AGE OF THE PURITANS 

XIV. THE TRIUMPH OF THE WHIGS . 

XV. THE WAR WITH THE GREAT REPUBLICS 

XVI. ARISTOCRACY AND THE DISCONTENTS . 

XVII. THE RETURN OF THE BARBARIAN . 

XVIII. CONCLUSION 



PAGE 

9 
14 
28 
40 
54 

71 

86 
103 
124 
141 

157 
178 
192 
211 
229 

245 
262 

280 



A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND 



I — Introduction 



IT will be very reasonably asked why I 
should consent, though upon a sort of 
challenge, to write even a popular essay 
in English history, who make no pretence 
to particular scholarship and am merely a mem- 
ber of the public. The answer is that I know 
just enough to know one thing: that a history 
from the standpoint of a member of the public 
has not been written. What we call the popu- 
lar histories should rather be called the anti- 
popular histories. They are all, nearly without 
exception, written against the people; and in 
them the populace is either ignored or elabo- 
rately proved to have been wrong. It is true 
that Green called his book "A Short History 
of the English People"; but he seems to have 
thought it too short for the people to be prop- 
erly mentioned. For instance, he calls one very 
large part of his story "Puritan England." 
But England never was Puritan. It would have 
been almost as unfair to call the rise of Henry 
of Navarre "Puritan France." And some of 
our extreme Whig historians would have been 
pretty nearly capable of calling the campaign 
of Wexford and Drogheda "Puritan Ireland." 

9 



10 A Short History of Englcmd 

But it is especially in the matter of the Mid- 
dle Ages that the popular histories trample 
upon the popular traditions. In this respect 
there is an almost comic contrast between the 
general information provided about England 
in the last two or three centuries, in which its 
present industrial system was being built up, 
and the general information given about the 
preceding centuries, which we call broadly me- 
diaeval. Of the sort of waxwork history which 
is thought sufficient for the side-show of the 
age of abbots and crusaders, a small instance 
will be sufficient. A popular Encyclopaedia ap- 
peared some years ago, professing among other 
things to teach English History to the masses ; 
and in this I came upon a series of pictures 
of the English kings. No one could expect 
them to be all authentic; but the interest at- 
tached to those that were necessarily imagi- 
nary. There is much vivid material in con- 
temporary literature for portraits of men like 
Henry H. or Edward I. ; but this did not seem 
to have been found, or even sought. And wan- 
dering to the image that stood for Stephen of 
Blois, my eye was staggered by a gentleman 
with one of those helmets with steel brims 
curved like a crescent, which went with the 
age of ruffs and trunk-hose. I am pretty nearly 
satisfied that the head was that of a halbadier 



Introduction 11 



at some such scene as the execution of Mary- 
Queen of Scots. But he had a helmet ; and hel- 
mets were mediaeval ; and any old helmet was 
good enough for Stephen. 

Now suppose the readers of that work of 
reference had looked for the portrait of Charles 
I. and found the head of a policeman. Sup- 
pose it had been taken, modern helmet and all, 
out of some snapshot in the Daily Sketch of the 
arrest of Mrs. Pankhurst. I think we may go 
so far as to say that the readers would have 
refused to accept it as a lifelike portrait of 
Charles I. They would have formed the opin- 
ion that there must be some mistake. Yet the 
time that elapsed between Stephen and Mary 
was much longer than the time that has elapsed 
between Charles and ourselves. The revolu- 
tion in human society between the first of the 
Crusades and the last of the Tudors was im- 
measurably more colossal and complete than 
any change between Charles and ourselves. 
And, above all, that revolution should be the 
first thing and the final thing in anything call- 
ing itself a popular history. For it is the story 
of how our populace gained great things, but 
to-day has lost everything. 

Now I will modestly maintain that I know 
more about English history than this ; and that 
I have as much right to make a popular sum- 



12 A Short History of England 

mary of it as the gentleman who made the cru- 
sader and the halbadier change hats. But the 
curious and arresting thing about the neglect, 
one might say the omission, of medieval civ- 
ilisation in such histories as his, lies in the 
fact that I have already noted. It is exactly 
the popular story that is left out of the popular 
history. For instance, even a working man, a 
carpenter or cooper or bricklayer, is taught 
to-day about the Great Charter, as something 
like the Great Auk, save that its almost mon- 
strous solitude came from being before its time 
instead of after. He is not taught that the 
whole stuff of the Middle Ages was stiff with 
the parchment of charters; that society was 
once a system of charters, and of a kind much 
more interesting to him. The carpenter hears 
of one charter given to barons, and chiefly in 
the interest of barons; the carpenter does not 
hear of any of the charters given to carpenters, 
to coopers, to all the people like himself. Or, 
to take another instance, the boy and girl read- 
ing the stock simplified histories of the schools 
practically never hear of such a thing as a 
burgher, until he appears in a shirt with a noose 
round his neck. They certainly do not imagine 
anything of what he meant in the Middle Ages. 
And Victorian shopkeepers did not conceive 
themselves as taking part in any such romance 



Introduction 13 



as the adventure of Courtrai, where the me- 
diseval shopkeepers more than won their spurs 
— for they won the spurs of their enemies. 

I have a very simple motive and excuse for 
telHng the Httle I know of this true tale. I 
have met in my wanderings a man brought up 
in the lower quarters of a great house, fed 
mainly on its leavings and burdened mostly 
with its labours. I know that his complaints 
are stilled, and his status justified, by a story 
that is told to him. It is about how his grand- 
father was a chimpanzee and his father a wild 
man of the woods, caught by hunters and tamed 
into something like intelligence. In the light 
of this, he may well be thankful for the almost 
human life that he enjoys ; and may be content 
with the hope of leaving behind him a yet more 
evolved animal. Strangely enough, the calling 
of this story by the sacred name of Progress 
ceased to satisfy me when I began to suspect 
(and to discover) that it is not true. I know 
by now enough at least of his origin to know 
that he was not evolved, but simply disinher- 
ited. His family tree is not a monkey tree, 
save in the sense that no monkey could have 
climbed it; rather it is like that tree torn up 
by the roots and named ''Dedischado/' on the 
shield of the unknown knight. 



II — The Province of Britain 



THE land on which we live once had 
the highly poetic privilege of being 
the end of the world. Its extremity 
was ultima ThtUe, the other end of 
nowhere. When these islands, lost in a night 
of northern seas, were lit up at last by the long 
searchlights of Rome, it was felt that the re- 
motest remnant of things had been touched; 
and more for pride than possession. 

The sentiment was not unsuitable, even in 
geography. About these realms upon the edge 
of everything there was really something that 
can only be called edgy. Britain is not so much 
an island as an archipelago; it is at least a 
labyrinth of peninsulas. In few of the kindred 
countries can one so easily and so strangely 
find sea in the fields or fields in the sea. The 
great rivers seem not only to meet in the ocean, 
but barely to miss each other in the hills : the 
whole land, though low as a whole, leans to- 
wards the west in shouldering mountains ; and 
a prehistoric tradition has taught it to look 
towards the sunset for islands yet dreamier 
than its own. The islanders are of a kind with 
their islands. Different as are the nations into 

14 



The Province of Britain 15 

which they are now divided, the Scots, the 
English, the Irish, the Welsh of the western 
uplands, have something altogether different 
from the humdrum docility of the inland Ger- 
mans, or from the ban sens frangais which can 
be at will trenchant or trite. There is some- 
thing common to all the Britons, which even 
acts of union have not torn asunder. The near- 
est name for it is insecurity, something fitting 
in men walking on cliffs and the verge of things. 
Adventure, a lonely taste in liberty, a humour 
without wit, perplex their critics and perplex 
themselves. Their souls are fretted like their 
coasts. They have an embarrassment, noted 
by all foreigners: it is expressed, perhaps, in 
the Irish by a confusion of speech and in the 
English by a confusion of thought. For the 
Irish bull is a license with the symbol of lan- 
guage. But Bull's own bull, the English bull, 
IS **a dumb ox of thought'' ; a standing mystifi- 
cation in the mind. There is something double 
in the thoughts as of the soul mirrored in many 
waters. Of all peoples they are least attached 
to the purely classical; the imperial plainness 
which the French do finely, and the Germans 
coarsely, but the Britons not at all. They are 
constantly colonists and emigrants; they have 
the name of being at home in every country. 
But they are in exile in their own country. 



16 A Short History of England 

They are torn between love of home and love of 
something else; of which the sea may be the 
explanation or may be only the symbol. It is 
also found in a nameless nursery rhyme which 
is the finest line in English literature and the 
dumb refrain of all English poems — "Over the 
hills and far away." 

The great rationalist hero who first con- 
quered Britain, whether or no he was the de- 
tached demigod of "Caesar and Cleopatra/' was 
certainly a Latin of the Latins, and described 
these islands when he found them with all the 
curt positivism of his pen of steel. But even 
Julius Caesar's brief account of the Britons 
leaves on us something of this mystery, which 
is more than ignorance of fact. They were 
apparently ruled by that terrible thing, a pagan 
priesthood. Stones now shapeless yet arranged 
in symbolic shapes bear witness to the order 
and labour of those that lifted them. Their 
worship was probably Ntature-worship ; and 
while such a basis may count for something in 
the elemental quality that has always soaked 
the island arts, the collision between it and the 
tolerant Empire suggests the presence of some- 
thing which generally grows out of Nature- 
worship — I mean the unnatural. But upon 
nearly all the matters of modern controversy 
Caesar is silent. He is silent about whether the 



The Province of Britain 17 

language was Gaulish; and some of the most 
ancient place-names have given rise to a sug- 
gestion that, in parts at least, it was already 
Teutonic. I am not capable of pronouncing 
upon the truth of such speculations, but I am 
of pronouncing upon their importance ; at least, 
to my own very simple purpose. And indeed 
their importance has been very much exagge- 
rated. Caesar professed to give no more than 
the glimpse of a traveller ; but when, some con- 
siderable time after, the Romans returned and 
turned Britain into a Roman province, they 
continued to display a singular indifference to 
questions that have excited so many professors. 
What they cared about was getting and giving 
in Britain what they had got and given in Gaul. 
We do not know whether the Britons then, or 
for that matter the Britons now, were Iberian 
or Cymric or Teutonic. We do know that in a 
short time they were Roman. 

Every now and then there is discovered in 
modern England some fragment such as a 
Roman pavement. Such Roman antiquities 
rather diminish than increase the Roman real- 
ity. They make something seem distant which 
is still very near, and something seem dead that 
is still alive. It is like writing a man's epitaph 
on his front door. The epitaph would prob- 
ably be a compliment, but hardly a personal 



18 A Short History of England 

introduction. The important thing about 
France and England is not that they have 
Roman remains. They are Roman remains. 
In truth they are not so much remains as reUcs ; 
for they are still working miracles. A row 
of poplars is a more Roman relic than a row 
of pillars. Nearly all that we call the works 
of nature have but grown like fungoids upon 
this original work of man ; and our woods are 
mosses on the bones of a giant. Under the 
seed of our harvests and the roots of our trees 
is a foundation of which the fragments of tile 
and brick are but emblems ; and under the col- 
ours of our wildest flowers are the colours of a 
Roman pavement. 

Britain was directly Roman for fully four 
hundred years ; longer than she has been Prot- 
estant, and very much longer than she has 
been industrial. What was meant by being 
Roman it is necessary in a few lines to say, or 
no sense can be made of what happened after, 
especially of what happened immediately after. 
Being Roman did not mean being subject, in 
the sense that one savage tribe will enslave 
another, or in the sense that the cynical politi- 
cians of recent times watched with a horrible 
hopefulness for the evanescence of the Irish. 
Both conquerors and conquered were heathen, 
and both had the institutions which seem to us 



The Province of Britain 19 

to give an inhumanity to heathenism: the tri- 
umph, the slave-market, the lack of all the 
sensitive nationalism of modern history. But 
the Roman Empire did not destroy nations; 
if anything, it created them. Britons were not 
originally proud of being Britons; but they 
were proud of being Romans. The Roman 
steel was at least as much a magnet as a sword. 
In truth it was rather a round mirror of steel, 
in which every people came to see itself. For 
Rome as Rome the very smallness of the civic 
origin was a warrant for the largeness of the 
civic experiment. Rome itself obviously could 
not rule the world, any more than Rutland. I 
mean it could not rule the other races as the 
Spartans ruled the Helots or the Americans 
ruled the negroes. A machine so huge had to 
be human; it had to have a handle that fitted 
any man's hand. The Roman Empire neces- 
sarily became less Roman as it became more 
of an Empire ; until not very long after Rome 
gave conquerors to Britain, Britain was giving 
emperors to Rome. Out of Britain, as the 
Britons boasted, came at length the great Em- 
press Helena, who was the mother of Constan- 
tine. And it was Constantine, as all men know, 
who first nailed up that proclamation which all 
after generations have in truth been struggling 
either to protect or to tear down. 



20 A Short History of England 

About that revolution no man has ever been 
able to be impartial. The present v^riter will 
make no idle pretence of being so. That it was 
the most revolutionary of all revolutions, since 
it identified the dead body on a service gibbet 
with the fatherhood in the skies, has long been 
a commonplace without ceasing to be a para- 
dox. But there is another historic element that 
must also be realised. Without saying any- 
thing more of its tremendous essence, it is 
very necessary to note why even pre-Christian 
Rome was regarded as something mystical for 
long afterwards by all European men. The 
extreme view of it was held, perhaps, by Dante ; 
but it pervaded medisevalism, and therefore still 
haunts modernity. Rome was regarded as 
Man, mighty, though fallen, because it was 
the utmost that Man had done. It was divinely 
necessary that the Roman Empire should suc- 
ceed — if only that it might fail. Hence the 
school of Dante implied the paradox that the 
Roman soldiers killed Christ, not only by right, 
but even by divine right. That mere law might 
fail at its highest test it had to be real law, and 
not mere military lawlessness. Therefore God 
worked by Pilate as by Peter. Therefore the 
mediaeval poet is eager to show that Roman 
government was simply good government, and 
not a usurpation. For it was the whole point of 



The Province of Britain 21 

the Christian revolution to maintain that in 
this, good government was as bad as bad. Even 
good government was not good enough to know 
God among the thieves. This is not only gen- 
erally important as involving a colossal change 
in the conscience; the loss of the whole heathen 
repose in the complete sufficiency of the city or 
the state. It made a sort of eternal rule enclos- 
ing an eternal rebellion. It must be incessantly 
remembered through the first half of English 
history ; for it is the whole meaning in the quar- 
rel of the priests and kings. 

The double rule of the civilisation and the 
religion in one sense remained for centuries; 
and before its first misfortunes came it must be 
conceived as substantially the same every- 
where. And however it began it largely ended 
in equality. Slavery certainly existed, as it 
had in the most democratic states of ancient 
times. Harsh officialism certainly existed, as 
it exists in the most democratic states of mod- 
ern times. But there was nothing of what we 
mean in modern times by aristocracy, still less 
of what we mean by racial domination. In so 
far as any change was passing over that soci- 
ety with its two levels of equal citizens and 
equal slaves, it was only the slow growth of 
the power of the Church at the expense of the 
power of the Empire. Now it is important to 



22 'A Short History of England 

grasp that the great exception to equality, the 
institution of Slavery, was slowly modified by 
both causes. It was weakened both by the 
weakening of the Empire and by the strength- 
ening of the Church. 

Slavery was for the Church not a difficulty 
of doctrine, but a strain on the imagination. 
Aristotle and the pagan sages who had defined 
the servile or ''usefur' arts, had regarded the 
slave as a tool, an axe to cut wood or what- 
ever wanted cutting. The Church did not de- 
nounce the cutting; but she felt as if she was 
cutting glass with a diamond. She was haunted 
by the memory that the diamond is so much 
more precious than the glass. So Christianity 
could not settle down into the pagan simplicity 
that the man was made for the work, when the 
work was so much less immortally momentous 
than the man. At about this stage of a history 
of England there is generally told the anecdote 
of a pun of Gregory the Great ; and this is per- 
haps the true point of it. By the Roman theory 
the barbarian bondmen were meant to be use- 
ful. The saint's mysticism was moved at find- 
ing them ornamental ; and "Non Angli sed An- 
geli" meant more nearly ''Not slaves, but 
souls." It is to the point, in passing, to note 
that in the modern country most collectively 
Christian, Russia, the serfs were always re- 



The Province of Britain 23 

ferred to as ''souls." The great Pope's phrase, 
hackneyed as it is, is perhaps the first glimpse 
of the golden halos in the best Christian Art. 
Thus the Church, with whatever other faults, 
worked of her own nature towards greater 
social equality; and it is a historical error to 
suppose that the Church hierarchy worked with 
aristocracies, or was of a kind with them. It 
was an inversion of aristocracy; in the ideal 
of it, at least, the last were to be first. The 
Irish bull that ''One man is as good as another 
and a great deal better" contains a truth, like 
many contradictions ; a truth that was the link 
between Christianity and citizenship. Alone 
of all superiors, the saint does not depress the 
human dignity of others. He is not conscious 
of his superiority to them; but only more con- 
scious of his inferiority than they are. 

But while a million little priests and monks 
like mice were already nibbling at the bonds of 
the ancient servitude, another process was 
going on, which has here been called the weak- 
ening of the Empire. It is a process which is 
to this day very difficult to explain. But it af- 
fected all the institutions of all the provinces, 
especially the institution of Slavery. But of 
all the provinces its effect was heaviest in Brit- 
ain, which lay on or beyond the borders. The 
case of Britain, however, cannot possibly be 



24 A Short History of England 

considered alone. The first half of English 
history has been made quite unmeaning in the 
schools by the attempt to tell it without refer- 
ence to that Corporate Christendom in which 
it took part and pride. I fully accept the truth 
in Mr. Kipling's question of 'What can they 
know of England who only England know?'' 
and merely differ from the view that they will 
best broaden their minds by the study of Wag- 
ga-Wagga and Timbuctoo. It is therefore nec- 
essary, though very difficult, to frame in few 
words some idea of what happened to the whole 
European race. 

Rome itself, which had made all that strong 
world, was the weakest thing in it. The centre 
had been growing fainter and fainter, and now 
the centre disappeared. Rome had as much 
freed the world as ruled it, and now she could 
rule no more. Save for the presence of the 
Pope and his constantly increasing supernatu- 
ral prestige, the Eternal City became like one 
of her own provincial towns. A loose localism 
was the result rather than any conscious in- 
tellectual mutiny. There was anarchy, but 
there was no rebellion. For rebellion must 
have a principle, and therefore (for those who 
can think) an authority. Gibbon called his 
great pageant of prose "The Decline and Fall 
of the Roman Empire." The Empire did de- 



The Province of Britain 25 

cline, but it did not fall. It remains to this 
hour. 

By a process very much more indirect even 
than that of the Church, this decentralisation 
and drift also worked against the slave-state of 
antiquity. The localism did indeed produce 
that choice of territorial chieftains which came 
to be called Feudalism, and of which we shall 
speak later. But the direct possession of man 
by man the same localism tended to destroy; 
though this negative influence upon it bears no 
kind of proportion to the positive influence of 
the Catholic Church. The later pagan slavery, 
like our own industrial labour which increas- 
ingly resembles it, was worked on a larger and 
larger scale; and it was at last too large to 
control. The bondman found the visible Lord 
more distant than the new invisible one. The 
slave became the serf ; that is, he could be shut 
in, but not shut out. When once he belonged 
to the land, it could not be long before the land 
belonged to him. Even in the old and rather 
fictitious language of chattel slavery, there is 
here a difference. It is the difference between 
a man being a chair and a man being a house. 
Canute might call for his throne; but if he 
wanted his throne-room he must go and get 
it himself. Similarly, he could tell his slave 
to run, but he could only tell his serf to stay. 



26 A Short History of England 



Thus the two slow changes of the time both 
tended to transform the tool into a man. His 
status began to have roots; and whatever has 
roots will have rights. 

What the decline did involve everywhere was 
decivilisation ; the loss of letters, of laws, of 
roads and means of communication, the exag- 
geration of local colour into caprice. But on 
the edges of the Empire this decivilisation be- 
came a definite barbarism, owing to the near- 
ness of wild neighbours who were ready to de- 
stroy as deafly and blindly as things are de- 
stroyed by fire. Save for the lurid and apoca- 
lyptic locust-flight of the Huns, it is perhaps 
an exaggeration to talk, even in those darkest 
ages, of a deluge of the barbarians; at least 
when we are speaking of the old civilisation as 
a whole. But a deluge of barbarians is not 
entirely an exaggeration of what happened on 
some of the borders of the Empire; of such 
edges of the known world as we began by de- 
scribing in these pages. And on the extreme 
edge of the world lay Britain. 

It may be true, though there is little proof of 
it, that the Roman civilisation itself was thin- 
ner in Britain than in the other provinces ; but 
it was a very civilised civilisation. It gathered 
round the great cities like York and Chester 
and London; for the cities are older than the 



The Province of Britain 27 

counties, and indeed older even than the coun- 
tries. These were connected by a skeleton of 
great roads which were and are the bones of 
Britain. But with the weakening of Rome the 
bones began to break under barbarian pressure, 
coming at first from the north ; from the Picts 
who lay beyond Agricola's boundary in what 
is now the Scotch Lowlands. The whole of 
this bewildering time is full of temporary tribal 
alliances, generally mercenary; of barbarians 
paid to come on or barbarians paid to go away. 
It seems certain that in this welter Roman 
Britain bought help from ruder races living 
about that neck of Denmark where is now the 
duchy of Schleswig. Having been chosen only 
to fight somebody they naturally fought any- 
body; and a century of fighting followed, under 
the trampling of which the Roman pavement 
was broken into yet smaller pieces. It is per- 
haps permissible to disagree with the historian 
Green when he says that no spot should be 
more sacred to modern Englishmen than the 
neighbourhood of Ramsgate, where the Schles- 
wig people are supposed to have landed; or 
when he suggests that their appearance is the 
real beginning of our island story. It would 
be rather more true to say that it was nearly, 
though prematurely, the end of it. 



Ill — The Age of Legends 



WE should be startled if we were 
quietly reading a prosaic mod- 
ern novel, and somewhere in 
the middle it turned without 
warning into a fairy tale. We should be sur- 
prised if one of the spinsters in Cranford, after 
tidily sweeping the room with a broom, were to 
fly away on a broomstick. Our attention would 
be arrested if one of Jane Austen^s young 
ladies who had just met a dragoon were to walk 
a little further and meet a dragon. Yet some- 
thing very like this extraordinary transition 
takes place in British history at the end of the 
purely Roman period. We go on reading ra- 
tional and almost mechanical accounts of en- 
campment and engineering, of a busy bureau- 
cracy and occasional frontier wars, quite mod- 
ern in their efficiency and inefficiency ; and then 
all of a sudden we are reading of wandering 
belles and wizard lances, of wars against men 
as tall as trees or as short as toadstools. The 
soldier of civilisation is no longer fighting with 
Goths but with goblins ; the land becomes a laby- 
rinth of faerie towns unknown to history ; and 

28 



The Age of Legends 29 

scholars can suggest but cannot explain how a 
Roman ruler or a Welsh chieftain towers up in 
the twilight as the awful and unbegotten Ar- 
thur. The scientific age comes first and the 
mythological age after it. One working exam- 
ple, the echoes of which lingered till very late 
in English literature, may serve to sum up the 
contrast. The British state which was found 
by Caesar was long believed to have been found- 
ed by Brutus. The contrast between the one 
very dry discovery and the other very fantastic 
foundation has something decidedly comic 
about it; as if Caesar's "Et tu. Brute,'' might be 
translated, ''What, 3/01^ here?" But in one re- 
spect the fable is quite as important as the fact. 
They both testify to the reality of the Roman 
foundation of our insular society, and show 
that even the stories that seem prehistoric are 
seldom pre-Roman. When England is Elf- 
land, the elves are not the Angles. All the 
phrases that can be used as clues through that 
tangle of traditions are more or less Latin 
phrases. And in all our speech there was no 
word more Roman than "romance." 

The Roman legions left Britain in the fourth 
century. This did not mean that the Roman 
civilisation left it ; but it did mean that the civi- 
lisation lay far more open both to admixture 
and attack. Christianity had almost certainly 



30 A Short History of England 

come to Britain, not indeed otherwise than by 
the routes established by Rome, but certainly 
long before the official Roman mission of Greg- 
ory the Great. It had certainly been largely 
swamped by later heathen invasions of the un- 
defended coasts. It may then rationally be 
urged that the hold both of the Empire and 
its new religion was here weaker than else- 
where, and that the description of the general 
civilisation in the last chapter is proportion- 
ately irrelevant. This, however, is not the 
chief truth of the matter. 

There is one fundamental fact which must 
be understood of the whole of this period. Yet 
a modern man must very nearly turn his mind 
upside down to understand it. Almost every 
modern man has in his head an association be- 
tween freedom and the future. The whole 
culture of our time has been full of the notion 
of ''A Good Time Coming." Now the whole 
culture of the Dark Ages was full of the notion 
of "A Good Time Going." They looked back- 
wards to old enlightenment and forwards to 
new prejudices. In our time there has come a 
quarrel between faith and hope — which per- 
haps must be healed by charity. But they 
were situated otherwise. They hoped — ^but it 
may be said that they hoped for yesterday. 
All the motives that make a man a progressive 



The Age of Legends 31 

now made a man a conservative then. The 
more he could keep of the past the more he had 
of a fair law and a free state; the more he gave 
way to the future the more he must endure 
of ignorance and privilege. All we call reason 
was one with all we call reaction. And this 
is the clue which we must carry with us 
through the lives of all the great men of the 
Dark Ages; of Alfred, of Bede, of Dunstan. 
If the most extreme modern Republican were 
put back in that period he would be an equally 
extreme Papist or even Imperialist. For the 
Pope was what was left of the Empire; and 
the Empire what was left of the Republic. 

We may compare the man of that time, there- 
fore, to one who has left free cities and even 
free fields behind him, and is forced to advance 
towards a forest. And the forest is the fittest 
metaphor, not only because it was really that 
wild European growth cloven here and there by 
the Roman roads, but also because there has 
always been associated with forests another 
idea which increased as the Roman order de- 
cayed. The idea of the forests was the idea 
of enchantment. There was a notion of things 
being double or different from themselves, of 
beasts behaving like men and not merely, as 
modern wits would say, of men behaving like 
beasts. But it is precisely here that it is most 



32 A Short History of England 

necessary to remember that an age of reason 
had preceded the age of magic. The central 
pillar which has sustained the storied house of 
our imagination ever since has been the idea 
of the civilised knight amid the savage enchant- 
ment; the adventures of a man still sane in a 
world gone mad. 

The next thing to note in the matter is this : 
that in this barbaric time none of the heroes 
are barbaric. They are only heroes if they are 
anti-barbaric. Men real or mythical, or more 
probably both, became omnipresent like gods 
among the people, and forced themselves into 
the faintest memory and the shortest record, 
exactly in proportion as they had mastered the 
heathen madness of the time and preserved the 
Christian rationality that had come from Rome. 
Arthur has his name because he killed the 
heathen; the heathen who killed him have no 
names at all. Englishmen who know nothing 
of English history, but less than nothing of 
Irish history, have heard somehow or other of 
Brian Boru, though they spell it Baroo and 
seem to be under the impression that it is a 
joke. It is a joke the subtlety of which they 
would never have been able to enjoy, if King 
Brian had not broken the heathen in Ireland at 
the great Battle of Clontarf. The ordinary 
English reader would never have heard of Olaf 



The Age of Legends 33 

of Norway if he had not ^'preached the Gospel 
with his sword"; or of the Cid if he had not 
fought against the Crescent. And though Al- 
fred the Great seems to have deserved his title 
even as a personality, he was not so great as 
the work he had to do. 

But the paradox remains that Arthur is more 
real than Alfred. For the age is the age of 
legends. Towards these legends most men 
adopt by instinct a sane attitude; and, of the 
two, credulity is certainly much more sane than 
incredulity. It does not much matter whether 
most of the stories are true; and (as in such 
cases as Bacon and Shakespeare) to realise 
that the question does not matter is the first 
step towards answering it correctly. But be- 
fore the reader dismisses anything like an at- 
tempt to tell the earlier history of the country 
by its legends, he will do well to keep two prin- 
ciples in mind, both of them tending to correct 
the crude and very thoughtless scepticism which 
has made this part of the story so sterile. The 
nineteenth-century historians went on the curi- 
ous principle of dismissing all people of whom 
tales are told, and concentrating upon people 
of whom nothing is told. Thus, Arthur is made 
utterly impersonal because all legends are lies, 
but somebody of the type of Hengist is made 
quite an important personality, merely because 



34 A Short History of England 

nobody thought him important enough to lie 
about. Now this is to reverse all common 
sense. A great many witty sayings are at- 
tributed to Talleyrand which were really said 
by somebody else. But they would not be so 
attributed if Talleyrand had been a fool, still 
less if he had been a fable. That fictitious 
stories are told about a person is, nine times 
out of ten, extremely good evidence that there 
was somebody to tell them about. Indeed some 
allow that marvellous things were done, and 
that there may have been a man named Arthur 
at the time in which they were done ; but here, 
so far as I am concerned, the distinction be- 
comes rather dim. I do not understand the 
attitude which holds that there was an Ark and 
a man named Noah, but cannot believe in the 
existence of Noah's Ark. 

The other fact to be remembered is that 
scientific research for the last few years has 
worked steadily in the direction of confirming 
and not dissipating the legends of the populace. 
To take only the obvious instance, modern ex- 
cavators with modern spades have found a 
solid stone labyrinth in Crete, like that associ- 
ated with the Minatour, which was conceived 
as being as cloudy a fable as the Chimera. To 
most people this would have seemed quite as 
frantic as finding the roots of Jack's Beanstalk 



The Age of Legends 35 

or the skeletons in Bluebeard's cupboard, yet it 
is simply the fact. Finally, a truth is to be 
remembered which scarcely ever is remembered 
in estimating the past. It is the paradox that 
the past is always present: yet it is not what 
was, but whatever seems to have been ; for all 
the past is a part of faith. What did they 
believe of their fathers? In this matter new 
discoveries are useless because they are new. 
We may find men wrong in what they thought 
they were, but we cannot find them wrong in 
what they thought they thought. It is there- 
fore very practical to put in a few words, if 
possible, something of what a man of these 
islands in the Dark Ages would have said about 
his ancestors and his inheritance. I will at- 
tempt here to put some of the simpler things 
in their order of importance as he would have 
seen them; and if we are to understand our 
fathers who first made this country anything 
like itself, it is most important that we should 
remember that if this was not their real past, 
it was their real memory. 

After that blessed crime, as the wit of mys- 
tics called it, which was for these men hardly 
second to the creation of the world, St. Joseph 
of Arimathea, one of the few followers of the 
new religion who seem to have been wealthy, 
set sail as a missionary, and after long voyages 



36 A Short History of England 



came to that litter of little islands which seemed 
to the men of the Mediterranean something like 
the last clouds of the sunset. He came up upon 
the western and wilder side of that wild and 
western land, and made his way to a valley 
which through all the oldest records is called 
Avalon. Something of rich rains and warmth 
in its westland meadows, or something in some 
lost pagan traditions about it, made it persis- 
tently regarded as a kind of earthly Paradise. 
Arthur, after being slain at Lyonesse, is car- 
ried here, as if to heaven. Here the pilgrim 
planted his staff in the soil; and it took root 
as a tree that blossoms on Christmas Day. 

A mystical materialism marked Christianity 
from its birth; the very soul of it was a body. 
Among the stoical philosophies and oriental 
negations that were its first foes it fought 
fiercely and particularly for a supernatural 
freedom to cure concrete maladies by concrete 
substances. Hence the scattering of relics was 
everywhere like the scattering of seed. All 
who took their mission from the divine tragedy 
bore tangible fragments which became the 
germs of churches and cities. St. Joseph car- 
ried the cup which held the wine of the Last 
Supper and the blood of the Crucifixion to that 
shrine in Avalon which we now call Glaston- 
bury; and it became the heart of a whole uni- 



The Age of Legends 37 

verse of legends and romances, not only for 
Britain but for Europe. Throughout this tre- 
mendous and branching tradition it is called 
the Holy Grail. The vision of it was espe- 
cially the reward of that ring of powerful pala- 
dins whom King Arthur feasted at a Round 
Table, a symbol of heroic comradeship such 
as was afterwards imitated or invented by me- 
diaeval knighthood. Both the cup and the table 
are of vast importance emblematically in the 
psychology of the chivalric experiment. The 
idea of a round table is not merely universality 
but equality. It has in it, modified of course, 
by other tendencies to differentiation, the same 
idea that exists in the very word ''peers,'' as 
given to the knights of Charlemagne. In this 
the Round Table is as Roman as the round 
arch, which might also serve as a type; for 
instead of being one barbaric rock merely rolled 
on the others, the king was rather the keystone 
of an arch. But to this tradition of a level of 
dignity was added something unearthly that 
was from Rome, but not of it; the privilege 
that inverted all privileges; the glimpse of 
heaven which seemed almost as capricious as 
fairyland; the flying chalice which was veiled 
from the highest of all the heroes, and which 
appeared to one knight who was hardly more 
than a child. 



38 A Short History of England 



Rightly or wrongly, this romance established 
Britain for after centuries as a country with a 
chivalrous past. Britain had been a mirror x)i 
universal knighthood. This fact, or fancy, is 
of colossal import in all ensuing affairs, espe- 
cially the affairs of barbarians. These and 
numberless other local legends are indeed for 
us buried by the forests of popular fancies that 
have grown out of them. It is all the harder 
for the serious modern mind because our fa- 
thers felt at home with these tales, and there- 
fore took liberties with them. Probably the 
rhyme which runs, 

"When good King Arthur ruled this land 
He was a noble king, 
He stole three pecks of barley meal," 

is much nearer the true mediaeval note than the 
aristocratic stateliness of Tennyson. But about 
all these grotesques of the popular fancy there 
is one last thing to be remembered. It must 
especially be remembered by those who would 
dwell exclusively on documents, and take no 
note of tradition at all. Wild as would be the 
results of credulity concerning all the old wives* 
tales, it would not be so wild as the errors that 
can arise from trusting to written evidence 
when there is not enough of it. Now the whole 
written evidence for the first parts of our his- 



The Age of Legends 39 

tory would go into a small book. A very few 
details are mentioned, and none are explained. 
A fact thus standing alone, without the key of 
contemporary thought, may be very much more 
misleading than any fable. To know what 
word an archaic scribe wrote without being 
sure of what thing he meant, may produce a 
result that is literally mad. Thus, for instance, 
it would be unwise to accept literally the tale 
that St. Helena was not only a native of Col- 
chester, but was a daughter of old King Cole. 
But it would not be very unwise; not so un- 
wise as some things that are deduced from 
documents. The natives of Colchester certainly 
did honour to St. Helena, and might have had 
a king named Cole. According to the more 
serious story, the saint's father was an inn- 
keeper; and the only recorded action of Cole 
is well within the resources of that calling. It 
would not be nearly so unwise as to deduce 
from the written word, as some critic of the 
future may do, that the natives of Colchester 
were oysters. 



IV — The Defeat of the Barbarians 



IT is a quaint accident that we employ the 
word "short-sighted" as a condemna- 
tion; but not the word "long-sighted," 
which we should probably use, if at all, 
as a compliment. Yet the one is as much a 
malady of vision as the other. We rightly 
say, in rebuke of a small-minded modernity, 
that it is very short-sighted to be indifferent 
to all that is historic. But it as disastrously 
long-sighted to be interested only in what is 
prehistoric. And this disaster has befallen a 
large proportion of the learned who grope in 
the darkness of unrecorded epochs for the roots 
of their favourite race or races. The wars, the 
enslavements, the primitive marriage customs, 
the colossal migrations and massacres upon 
which their theories repose, are no part of his- 
tory or even of legend. And rather than trust 
with entire simplicity to these it would be in- 
finitely wiser to trust to legend of the loosest 
and most local sort. In any case, it is as well 
to record even so simple a conclusion as that 
what is prehistoric is unhistorical. 

But there is another way in which common 
sense can be brought to the criticism of some 

40 



V 



The Defeat of the Barbarians 41 



prodigious racial theories. To employ the same 
%ure, suppose the scientific historians explain 
the historic centuries in terms of a prehistoric 
division between short-sighted and long-sight- 
ed men. They could cite their instances and 
illustrations. They would certainly explain the 
curiosity of language I mentioned first, as 
showing that the short-sighted were the con- 
quered race, and their name therefore a term 
of contempt. They could give us very graphic 
pictures of the rude tribal war. They could 
show how the long-sighted people were always 
cut to pieces in hand-to-hand struggles with 
axe and knife ; until, with the invention of bows 
and arrows, the advantage veered to the long- 
sighted, and their enemies were shot down in 
droves. I could easily write a ruthless romance 
about it, and still more easily a ruthless an- 
thropological theory. According to that thesis 
which refers all moral to material changes, 
they could explain the tradition that old people 
grow conservative in politics by the well-known 
fact that old people grow more long-sighted. 
But I think there might be one thing about this 
theory which would stump us, and might even, 
if it be possible, stump them. Suppose it were 
pointed out that through all the three thousand 
years of recorded history, abounding in litera- 
ture of every conceivable kind, there was not 



42 A Short History of England 

so much as a mention of the oculist question 
for which all had been dared and done. Sup- 
pose not one of the living or dead languages 
of mankind had so much as a word for "long- 
sighted" or ''short-sighted/' Suppose, in short, 
the question that had torn the whole world in 
two was never even asked at all, until some 
spectacle-maker suggested it somewhere about 
1750. In that case I think we should find it 
hard to believe that this physical difference had 
really played so fundamental a part in human 
history. And that is exactly the case with the 
physical difference between the Celts, the Teu- 
tons and the Latins. 

I know of no way in which fair-haired peo- 
ple can be prevented from falling in love with 
dark-haired people; and I do not believe that 
whether a man was long-headed or round- 
headed ever made much difference to any one 
who felt inclined to break his head. To all 
mortal appearance, in all mortal records and 
experience, people seem to have killed or 
spared, married or refrained from marriage, 
made kings or made slaves, with reference to 
almost any other consideration except this one. 
There was the love of a valley or a village, a 
site or a family ; there were enthusiasms for a 
prince and his hereditary office ; there were pas- 
sions rooted in locality, special emotions about 



The Defeat of the Barbarians 43 

sea-folk or mountain-f oik ; there were historic 
memories of a cause or an alliance; there was, 
more than all, the tremendous test of religion. 
But of a cause like that of the Celts or Teu- 
tons, covering half the earth, there was little 
or nothing. Race was not only never at any 
given moment a motive, but it was never even 
an excuse. The Teutons never had a creed; 
they never had a cause ; and it was only a few 
years ago that they began even to have a cant. 
The orthodox modern historian, notably 
Green, remarks on the singularity of Britain 
in being alone of all Roman provinces wholly 
cleared and repeopled by a Germanic race. He 
does not entertain, as an escape from the sin- 
gularity of this event, the possibility that it 
never happened. In the same spirit he deals 
with the little that can be quoted of the Teu- 
tonic society. His ideal picture of it is com- 
pleted in small touches which even an amateur 
can detect as dubious. Thus he will touch on 
the Teuton with a phrase like *'the basis of their 
society was the free man'* ; and on the Roman 
with a phrase like ''the mines, if worked by 
forced labour, must have been a source of end- 
less oppression." The simple fact being that 
the Roman and the Teuton both had slaves, he 
treats the Teuton free man as the only thing to 
be considered, not only then but now ; and then 



44 A Short History of England 



goes out of his way to say that if the Roman 
treated his slaves badly, the slaves were badly 
treated. He expresses a ''strange disappoint- 
ment'' that Gildas, the only British chronicler, 
does not describe the great Teutonic system. 
In the opinion of Gildas, a modification of that 
of Gregory, it was a case of nan Angli sed 
diaboli. The modern Teutonist is "disap- 
pointed" that the contemporary authority saw 
nothing in his Teutons except wolves, dogs, 
and whelps from the kennel of barbarism. But 
it is at least faintly tenable that there was noth- 
ing else to be seen. 

In any case when St. Augustine came to the 
largely barbarised land, with what may be 
called the second of the three great southern 
visitations which civilised these islands, he did 
not see any ethnological problems, whatever 
there may have been to be seen. With him or 
his converts the chain of literary testimony is 
taken up again ; and we must look at the world 
as they saw it. He found a king ruling in 
Kent, beyond whose borders lay other king- 
doms of about the same size, the kings of which 
were all apparently heathen. The names of 
these kings were mostly what we call Teutonic 
names ; but those who write the almost entirely 
hagiological records did not say, and appar- 
ently did not ask, whether the populations were 



The Defeat of the Barbarians 45 

of mixed or unmixed blood. It is at least pos- 
sible that, as on the Continent, the kings and 
courts were almost the only Teutonic element. 
The Christians found converts, they found pa- 
trons, they found persecutors ; but they did not 
find Ancient Britons because they did not look 
for them; and if they moved among pure An- 
glo-Saxons they had not the gratification of 
knowing it. There was, indeed, what all his- 
tory attests, a marked change of feeling upon 
the marches of Wales. But all history also 
attests that this is always found, apart from 
any difiference in race, in the transition from 
the lowlands to the mountain country. But 
of all the things they found the thing that 
counts most in English history is this: that 
some of the kingdoms at least did correspond 
to genuine human divisions, which not only 
existed then but which exist now. Northum- 
bria is still a truer thing than Northumberland. 
Sussex is still Sussex; Essex is still Essex. 
And that third Saxon kingdom whose name is 
not even to be found upon the map, the king- 
dom of Wessex, is called the West Country 
and is to-day the most real of them all. 

The last of the heathen kingdoms to accept 
the cross was Mercia, which corresponds very 
roughly to what we call the Midlands. The 
unbaptised king, Penda, has even achieved a 



46 A Short History of England 

certain picturesqueness through this fact, and 
through the forays and furious ambitions 
which constituted the rest of his reputation ; so 
much so that the other day one of those mystics 
who will believe anything but Christianity pro- 
posed to "continue the work of Penda" in Eal- 
ing : fortunately not on any large scale. What 
that prince believed or disbelieved it is now 
impossible and perhaps unnecessary to dis- 
cover; but this last stand of his central king- 
dom is not insignificant. The isolation of the 
Mercian was perhaps due to the fact that Chris- 
tianity grew from the eastern and western 
coasts. The eastern growth was, of course, 
the Augustinian mission, which had already 
made Canterbury the spiritual capital of the 
island. The western grew from whatever was 
left of the British Christianity. The two 
clashed, not in creed but in customs; and the 
Augustinians ultimately prevailed. But the 
work from the west had already been enor- 
mous. It is possible that some prestige went 
with the possession of Glastonbury, which was 
like a piece of the Holy Land; but behind Glas- 
tonbury there w^as an even grander and more 
impressive power. There irradiated to all Eu- 
rope at that time the glory of the golden age 
of Ireland. There the Celts were the classics 
of Christian art, opened in the Book of Kds 



The Defeat of the Barbarians 47 

four hundred years before its time. There the 
baptism of the whole people had been a spon- 
taneous popular festival which reads almost 
like a picnic; and thence came crowds of en- 
thusiasts for the Gospel almost literally like 
men running with good news. This must be 
remembered through the development of that 
dark dual destiny that has bound us to Ireland; 
for doubts have been thrown on a national 
unity which was not from the first a political 
unity. But if Ireland was not one kingdom it 
was in reality one bishopric. Ireland was not 
converted but created by Christianity, as a 
stone church is created; and all its elements 
were gathered as under a garment, under the 
genius of St. Patrick. It was the more indi- 
vidual because the religion was mere religion, 
without the secular conveniences. Ireland was 
never Roman, and it was always Romanist. 

But indeed this is, in a lesser degree, true of 
our more immediate subject. It is the para- 
dox of this time that only the unworldly things 
had any worldly success. The politics are a 
nightmare ; the kings are unstable and the king- 
doms shifting; and we are really never on solid 
ground except on consecrated ground. The ma- 
terial ambitions are not only always unfruitful 
but nearly always unfulfilled. The castles are 
all castles in the air; it is only the churches 



48 A Short History of England 

that are built on the ground. The visionaries 
are the only practical men, as in that extraordi- 
nary thing, the monastery, which was, in many 
ways, to be the key of our history. The time 
was to come when it was to be rooted out of 
our country with a curious and careful vio- 
lence; and the modern English reader has 
therefore a very feeble idea of it and hence of 
the ages in which it worked. Even in these 
pages a word or two about its primary nature 
is therefore quite indispensable. 

In the tremendous testament of our religion 
there are present certain ideals that seem wilder 
than impieties, which have in later times pro- 
duced wild sects professing an almost inhuman 
perfection on certain points; as in the Quakers 
who renounce the right of self-defence, or the 
Communists who refuse any personal posses- 
sions. Rightly or wrongly, the Christian 
Church had from the first dealt with these 
visions as being special spiritual adventures 
which were to the adventurous. She reconciled 
them with natural human life by calling them 
specially good, without admitting that the neg- 
lect of them was necessarily bad. She took 
the view that it takes all sorts to make a world, 
even the religious world; and used the man 
who chose to go without arms, family, or prop- 
erty as a sort of exception that proved the rule. 



The Defeat of the Barbarians 49 

Now the interesting fact is that he really did 
prove it. This madman who would not mind 
his own business becomes the business man of 
the age. The very word ''monk" is a revolu- 
tion, for it means solitude and came to mean 
community — one might call it sociality. What 
happened was that this communal life became 
a sort of reserve and refuge behind the indi- 
vidual life; a hospital for every kind of hospi- 
tality. We shall see later how this same func- 
tion of the common life was given to the com- 
mon land. It is hard to find an image for it 
in individualist times; but in private life we 
most of us know the friend of the family who 
helps it by being outside, like a fairy god- 
mother. It is not merely flippant to say that 
monks and nuns stood to mankind as a sort of 
sanctified league of aunts and uncles. It is a 
commonplace that they did everything that no- 
body else would do; that the abbeys kept the 
world's diary, faced the plagues of all flesh, 
taught the first technical arts, preserved the 
pagan literature, and above all, by a perpetual 
patchwork of charity, kept the poor from the 
most distant sight of their modern despair. 
We still find it necessary to have a reserve of 
philanthropists, but we trust it to men who 
have made themselves rich, not to men who 
have made themselves poor. Finally, the abbots 



50 A Short History of England 

and abbesses were elective. They introduced 
representative government, unknown to ancient 
democracy, and in itself a semi-sacramental 
idea. If we could look from the outside at our 
own institutions, we should see that the very 
notion of turning a thousand men into one 
large man walking to Westminster is not only 
an act of faith, but a fairy tale. The fruitful 
and effective history of Anglo-Saxon England 
would be almost entirely a history of its mon- 
asteries. Mile by mile, and almost man by 
man, they taught and enriched the land. And 
then, about the beginning of the ninth century, 
there came a turn, as of the twinkling of an 
eye, and it seemed that all their work was in 
vain. 

That outer world of universal anarchy that 
lay beyond Christendom heaved another of its 
colossal and almost cosmic waves and swept 
everything away. Through all the eastern 
gates, left open, as it were, by the first bar- 
barian auxiliaries, burst a plague of seafaring 
savages from Denmark and Scandinavia; and 
the recently baptised barbarians were again 
flooded by the unbaptised. All this time, it must 
be remembered, the actual central mechanism 
of Roman government had been running down 
like a clock. It was really a race between the 
driving energy of the missionaries on the edges 



The Defeat of the Barbarians 51 

of the Empire and the galloping paralysis of 
the city at the centre. In the ninth century the 
heart had stopped before the hands could bring 
help to it. All the monastic civilisation which 
had grown up in Britain under a vague Roman 
protection perished unprotected. The toy king- 
doms of the quarrelling Saxons were smashed 
like sticks; Guthrum, the pirate chief, slew St. 
Edmund, assumed the crown of East England, 
took tribute from the panic of Mercia, and tow- 
ered in menace over Wessex, the last of the 
Christian lands. The story that follows, page 
after page, is only the story of its despair and 
its destruction. The story is a string of Chris- 
tian defeats alternated with victories so vain as 
to be more desolate than defeats. It is only 
in one of these, the fine but fruitless victory 
at Ashdown, that we first see in the dim strug- 
gle, in a desperate and secondary part, the fig- 
ure who has given his title to the ultimate turn- 
ing of the tide. For the victor was not then the 
king, but only the king's younger brother. 
There is, from the first, something humble and 
even accidental about Alfred. He was a great 
understudy. The interest of his early life lies 
in this: that he combined an almost common- 
place coolness, and readiness for the ceaseless 
small bargains and shifting combinations of all 
that period, with the flaming patience of saints 



52 A Short History of England 



in times of persecution. While he would dare 
anything for the faith, he would bargain in 
anything except the faith. He was a con- 
queror, with no ambition; an author only too 
glad to be a translator ; a simple, concentrated, 
wary man, watching the fortunes of one thing, 
which he piloted both boldly and cautiously, 
and which he saved at last. 

He had disappeared after what appeared to 
be the final heathen triumph and settlement, 
and is supposed to have lurked like an outlaw 
in a lonely islet in the impenetrable marshlands 
of the Parret ; towards those wild western lands 
to which aboriginal races are held to have been 
driven by fate itself. But Alfred, as he him- 
self wrote in words that are his challenge to the 
period, held that a Christian man was uncon- 
cerned with fate. He began once more to draw 
to him the bows and spears of the broken levies 
of the western shires, especially the men of 
Somerset; and in the spring of 878 he flung 
them at the lines before the fenced camp of the 
victorious Danes at Ethandune. His sudden 
assault was as successful as that at Ashdown, 
and it was followed by a siege which was suc- 
cessful in a different and very definite sense. 
Guthrum, the conqueror of England, and all 
his important supports, were here penned be- 
hind their palisades, and when at last they 



The Defeat of the Barbarians 53 

surrendered the Danish conquest had come to 
an end. Guthrum was baptised, and the Treaty 
of Wedmore secured the clearance of Wessex. 
The modern reader will smile at the baptism, 
and turn with greater interest to the terms of 
the treaty. In this acute attitude the modern 
reader will be vitally and hopelessly wrong. 
He must support the tedium of frequent ref- 
erences to the religious element in this part of 
English history, for without it there would 
never have been any English history at all. 
And nothing could clinch this truth more than 
the case of the Danes. In all the facts that 
followed, the baptism of Guthrum is really 
much more important than the Treaty of Wed- 
more. The treaty itself was a compromise, 
and even as such did not endure; a century 
afterwards a Danish king like Canute was 
really ruling in England. But though the Dane 
got the crown, he did not get rid of the cross. 
It was precisely Alfred's religious exaction that 
remained unalterable. And Canute himself is 
actually now only remembered by men as a 
witness to the futility of merely pagan power ; 
as the king who put his own crown upon the 
image of Christ, and solemnly surrendered to 
heaven the Scandinavian empire of the sea. 



V — St, Edward and the Norman Kings 

THE reader may be surprised at the 
disproportionate importance given 
to the name which stands first in 
the title of this chapter. I put it 
there as the best way of emphasising, at the be- 
ginning of what we may call the practical part 
of our history, an elusive and rather strange 
thing. It can only be described as the strength 
of the weak kings. 

It is sometimes valuable to have enough 
imagination to unlearn as well as to learn. I 
would ask the reader to forget his reading and 
everything that he learnt at school, and consider 
the English monarchy as it would then appear 
to him. Let him suppose that his acquaintance 
with the ancient kings has only come to him as 
it came to most men in simpler times, from 
nursery tales, from the names of places, from 
the dedications of churches and charities, from 
the tales in the tavern, and the tombs in the 
churchyard. Let us suppose such a person 
going upon some open and ordinary English 
way,^ such as the Thames valley to Windsor, 
or visiting some old seats of culture, such as 

54 



St, Edward and the Norman Kings 55 

Oxford or Cambridge. One of the first things, 
for instance, he would find would be Eton, a 
place transformed, indeed, by modern aristoc- 
racy, but still enjoying its mediaeval wealth and 
remembering its mediaeval origin. If he asked 
about that origin, it is probable that even a 
public schoolboy would know enough history 
to tell him that it was founded by Henry VI. 
If he went to Cambridge and looked with his 
own eyes for the college chapel which artisti- 
cally towers above all others like a cathedral, 
he would probably ask about it, and be told 
it was King's College. If he asked which king, 
he would again be told Henry VI. If he then 
went into the library and looked up Henry VI. 
in an encyclopaedia, he would find that the leg- 
endary giant, who had left these gigantic works 
behind him, was in history an almost invisible 
pigmy. Amid the varying and contending 
numbers of a great national quarrel, he is the 
only cipher. The contending factions carry 
him about like a bale of goods. His desires do 
not seem to be even ascertained, far less satis- 
fied. And yet his real desires are satisfied in 
stone and marble, in oak and gold, and remain 
through all the maddest revolutions of modern 
England, while all the ambitions of those who 
dictated to him have gone away like dust upon 
the wind. 



56 A Short History of England 

Edward the Confessor, like Henry VI., was 
not only an invalid but almost an idiot. It is 
said that he was wan like an Albino, and that 
the awe men had of him was partly that which 
is felt for a monster of mental deficiency. His 
Christian charity was of the kind that borders 
on anarchism, and the stories about him recall 
the Christian fools in the great anarchic novels 
of Russia. Thus he is reported to have covered 
the retreat of a common thief upon the naked 
plea that the thief needed things more than he 
did. Such a story is in strange contrast to the 
claims made for other kings, that theft was 
impossible in their dominions. Yet the two 
types of king are afterwards praised by the 
same people; and the really arresting fact is 
that the incompetent king is praised the more 
highly of the two. And exactly as in the case 
of the last Lancastrian, we find that the praise 
has really a very practical meaning in the long 
run. When we turn from the destructive to 
the constructive side of the Middle Ages we find 
that the village idiot is the inspiration of cities 
and civic systems. We find his seal upon the 
sacred foundations of Westminster Abbey. We 
find the Norman victors in the hour of victory 
bowing before his very ghost. In the Tapestry 
of Bayeux, woven by Norman hands to justify 
the Norman cause and glorify the Norman tri- 



St. Edward and the Norman Kings 57 

umph, nothing is claimed for the Conqueror 
beyond his conquest and the plain personal tale 
that excuses it, and the story abruptly ends 
with the breaking of the Saxon line at Battle. 
But over the bier of the decrepit Zany, who 
died without striking a blow, over this and this 
alone, is shown a hand coming out of heaven 
and declaring the true approval of the power 
that rules the world. 

The Confessor, therefore, is a paradox in 
many ways, and in none more than in the false 
reputation of the "English'' of that day. As I 
have indicated, there is some unreality in talk- 
ing about the Anglo-Saxon at all. The Anglo- 
Saxon is a mythical and straddling giant, who 
has presumably left one footprint in England 
and the other in Saxony. But there was a 
community, or rather group of communities, 
living in Britain before the Conquest under 
what we call Saxon names, and of a blood prob- 
ably more Germanic and certainly less French 
than the same communities after the Conquest. 
And they have a modern reputation which is 
exactly the reverse of their real one. The value 
of the Anglo-Saxon is exaggerated, and yet 
his virtues are ignored. Our Anglo-Saxon 
blood is supposed to be the practical part of 
us; but as a fact the Anglo-Saxons were 
more hopelessly unpractical than any Celt. 



58 A Short History of England 

Their racial influence is supposed to be healthy, 
or, what many think the same thing, heathen. 
But as a fact these ^'Teutons" were the mystics. 
The Anglo-Saxons did one thing, and one thing 
only, thoroughly well, as they were fitted to 
do it thoroughly well. They christened Eng- 
land. Indeed, they christened it before it was 
born. The one thing the Angles obviously and 
certainly could not manage to do was to become 
English. But they did become Christians, and 
indeed showed a particular disposition to be- 
come monks. Moderns who talk vaguely of 
them as our hardy ancestors never do justice 
to the real good they did us, by thus opening 
our history, as it were, with the fable of an 
age of innocence, and beginning all our chron- 
icles, as so many chronicles began, with the 
golden initial of a saint. By becoming monks 
they served us in many very valuable and spe- 
cial capacities, but not notably, perhaps, in the 
capacity of ancestors. 

Along the northern coast of France, where 
the Confessor had passed his early life, lay the 
lands of one of the most powerful of the French 
king's vassals, the Duke of Normandy. He 
and his people, who constitute one of the most 
picturesque and curious elements in European 
history, are confused for most of us by irrele- 
vant controversies which would have been en- 



St. Edward and the Norman Kings 59 

tirely unintelligible to them. The worst of 
these is the inane fiction which gives the name 
of Norman to the English aristocracy during 
its great period of the last three hundred years. 
Tennyson informed a lady of the name of Vere 
de Vere that simple faith was more valuable 
than Norman blood. But the historical student 
who can believe in Lady Clara as the possessor 
of the Norman blood must be himself a large 
possessor of the simple faith. As a matter of 
fact, as we shall see also when we come to the 
political scheme of the Normans, the notion is 
the negation of their real importance in history. 
The fashionable fancy misses what was best 
in the Normans, exactly as we have found it 
missing what was best in the Saxons. One 
does not know whether to thank the Normans 
more for appearing or for disappearing. Few 
philanthropists ever became so rapidly anony- 
mous. It is the great glory of the Norman ad- 
venturer that he threw himself heartily into 
his chance position ; and had faith not only in 
his comrades, but in his subjects, and even in 
his enemies. He was loyal to the kingdom he 
had not yet made. Thus the Norman Bruce be- 
comes a Scot; thus the descendant of the Nor- 
man Strongbow becomes an Irishman. No men 
less than Normans can be conceived as remain- 
ing as a superior caste until the present time. 



60 A Short History of England 

But this alien and adventurous loyalty in the 
Norman, which appears in these other national 
histories, appears most strongly of all in the 
history we have here to follow. The Duke of 
Normandy does become a real King of Eng- 
land; his claim through the Confessor, his elec- 
tion by the Council, even his symbolic handfuls 
of the soil of Sussex, these are not altogether 
empty forms. And though both phrases would 
be inaccurate, it is very much nearer the truth 
to call William the first of the English than 
to call Harold the last of them. 

|An indeterminate debate touching the dim 
races that mixed without record in that dim 
epoch, has made much of the fact that the Nor- 
man edges of France, like the East Anglian 
edges of England, were deeply penetrated by 
the Norse invasions of the ninth century; and 
that the ducal house of Normandy, with what 
other families we know not, can be traced back 
to a Scandinavian seed. The unquestionable 
power of capacity and creative legislation which 
belonged to the Normans, whoever they were, 
may be connected reasonably enough with some 
infusion of fresh blood. But if the racial the- 
orists press the point to a comparison of races, 
it can obviously only be answered by a study 
of the two types in separation. And it must 
surely be manifest that more civilising power 



St, Edward and the Norman Kings 61 

has since been shown by the French when un- 
touched by Scandinavian blood than by the 
Scandinavians when untouched by French 
blood. As much fighting (and more ruling) 
was done by the Crusaders who were never 
Vikings as by the Vikings who were never Cru- 
saders. But in truth there is no need of such 
invidious analysis; we may willingly allow a 
real value to the Scandinavian contribution to 
the French as to the English nationality, so 
long as we firmly understand the ultimate his- 
toric fact that the duchy of Normandy was 
about as Scandinavian as the town of Nor- 
wich. But the debate has another danger, in 
that it tends to exaggerate even the personal 
importance of the Norman. Many as were his 
talents as a master, he is in history the servant 
of other and wider things. The landing of 
Lanfranc is perhaps more of a date than the 
landing of William. And Lanfranc was an Ital- 
ian — like Julius Csesar. The Norman is not in 
history a mere wall, the rather brutal boundary 
of a mere empire. The Norman is a gate. He 
is like one of those gates which still remain as 
he made them, with round arch and rude pat- 
tern and stout supporting columns; and what 
entered by that gate was civilisation. William 
of Falaise has in history a title much higher 
than that of Duke of Normandy or King 



62 A Short History of England 

of England. He was what Julius Csesar was, 
and what St. Augustine was: he was the am- 
bassador of Europe to Britain. 

William asserted that the Confessor, in the 
course of that connection which followed natu- 
rally from his Norman education, had prom- 
ised the English crown to the holder of the 
Norman dukedom. Whether he did or not we 
shall probably never know: it is not intrinsic- 
ally impossible or even improbable. To blame 
the promise as unpatriotic, even if it was given, 
is to read duties defined at a much later date 
into the first feudal chaos ; to make such blame 
positive and personal is like expecting the an- 
cient Britons to sing ^'Rule Britannia.*' Wil- 
liam further clinched his case by declaring that 
Harold, the principal Saxon noble and the most 
probable Saxon claimant, had, while enjoying 
the Duke's hospitality after a shipwreck, sworn 
upon sacred relics not to dispute the Duke's 
claim. About this episode also we must agree 
that we do not know ; yet we shall be quite out 
of touch with the time if we say that we do not 
care. The element of sacrilege in the alleged 
perjury of Harold probably afifected the Pope 
when he blessed a banner for William's army ; 
but it did not affect the Pope much more than 
it would have affected the people ; and Harold's 



St, Edward and the Norman Kings 63 

people quite as much as William's. Harold's 
people presumably denied the fact; and their 
denial is probably the motive of the very 
marked and almost eager emphasis with which 
the Bayeux Tapestry asserts and reasserts the 
reality of the personal betrayal. There is here 
a rather arresting fact to be noted. A great 
part of this celebrated pictorial record is not 
concerned at all with the well-known historical 
events which we have only to note rapidly here. 
It does, indeed, dwell a little on the death of 
Edward; it depicts the difficulties of William's 
enterprise in the felling of forests for ship- 
building, in the crossing of the Channel, and 
especially in the charge up the hill at Hastings, 
in which full justice is done to the destructive 
resistance of Harold's army. But it was really 
after Duke William had disembarked and de- 
feated Harold on the Sussex coast, that he did 
what is historically worthy to be called the Con- 
quest. It is not until these later operations 
that we have the note of the new and scientific 
militarism from the Continent. Instead of 
marching upon London he marched round it; 
and crossing the Thames at Wallingford cut 
off the city from the rest of the country and 
compelled its surrender. He had himself elected 
king with all the forms that would have accom- 
panied a peaceful succession to the Confessor, 



64 A Short History of England 

and after a brief return to Normandy took up 
the work of war again to bring all England 
under his crown. Marching through the snow, 
he laid waste the northern counties, seized 
Chester, and made rather than won a king- 
dom. These things are the foundations of his- 
torical England; but of these things the pic- 
tures woven in honour of his house tell us 
nothing. The Bayeux Tapestry may almost be 
said to stop before the Norman Conquest. But 
it tells in great detail the tale of some trivial 
raid into Brittany solely that Harold and Wil- 
liam may appear as brothers in arms ; and espe- 
cially that William may be depicted in the very 
act of giving arms to Harold. And here again 
there is much more significance than a modern 
reader may fancy, in its bearing upon the new 
birth of that time and the ancient symbolism 
of arms. I have said that Duke William was 
a vassal of the King of France ; and that phrase 
in its use and abuse is the key to the secular 
side of this epoch. William was indeed a most 
mutinous vassal, and a vein of such mutiny 
runs through his family fortunes: his sons 
Rufus and Henry I. disturbed him with internal 
ambitions antagonistic to his own. But it 
would be a blunder to allow such personal 
broils to obscure the system, which had indeed 
existed here before the Conquest, which clari- 



St. Edward and the Norman Kings 65 

fied and confirmed it. That system we call 
Feudalism. 

That Feudalism was the main mark of the 
Middle Ages is a commonplace of fashionable 
information; but it is of the sort that seeks 
the past rather in Wardour Street than Wat- 
ling Street. For that matter, the very term 
''mediaeval" is used for almost anything from 
Early English to Early Victorian. An eminent 
Socialist applied it to our armaments, which 
is like applying it to our aeroplanes. Simi- 
larly the just description of Feudalism, and of 
how far it was a part and how far rather an 
impediment in the main mediaeval movement, 
is confused by current debates about quite mod- 
ern things — especially that modern thing, the 
English squirearchy. Feudalism was very 
nearly the opposite of squirearchy. For it is 
the whole point of the squire that his ownership 
is absolute and is pacific. And it is the very 
definition of Feudalism that it was a tenure, 
and a tenure by military service. Men paid 
their rent in steel instead of gold, in spears and 
arrows against the enemies of their landlord. 
But even these landlords were not landlords 
in the modern sense ; every one was practically 
as well as theoretically a tenant of the king; 
and even he often fell into a feudal inferiority 
to a Pope or an Emperor. To call it mere tenure 



66 A Short History of England 

by soldiering may seem a simplification; but 
indeed it is precisely here that it was not so 
simple as it seems. It is precisely a certain 
knot or enigma in the nature of Feudalism 
which makes half the struggle of European his- 
tory, but especially English history. 

There was a certain unique type of state and 
culture which we call mediaeval, for want of a 
better word, which we see in the Gothic or the 
great Schoolmen. This thing in itself was 
above all things logical. Its very cult of au- 
thority was a thing of reason, as all men who 
can reason themselves instantly recognise, even 
if, like Huxley, they deny its premises or dis- 
like its fruits. Being logical, it was very exact 
about who had the authority. Now, Feudal- 
ism was not quite logical, and was never quite 
exact about who had the authority. Feudal- 
ism already flourished before the mediaeval 
renascence began. It was, if not the forest 
the medisevals had to clear, at least the rude 
timber with which they had to build. Feudal- 
ism was a fighting growth of the Dark Ages 
before the Middle Ages; the age of barbarians 
resisted by semi-barbarians. I do not say this 
in disparagement of it. Feudalism was mostly 
a very human thing ; the nearest contemporary 
name for it was homage, a word which almost 
means humanity. On the other hand, mediaeval 



St, Edward and the Norman Kings 67 

logic, never quite reconciled to it, could become 
in its extremes inhuman. It was often mere 
prejudice that protected men, and pure reason 
that burned them. The feudal units grew 
through the lively localism of the Dark Ages, 
when hills without roads shut in a valley like 
a garrison. Patriotism had to be parochial; 
for men had no country, but only a countryside. 
In such cases the lord grew^ larger than the 
king; but it bred not only a local lordship but 
a kind of local liberty. And it would be very 
inadvisable to ignore the freer element in Feu- 
dalism in English history. For it is the one 
kind of freedom that the English have had and 
held. 

The knot in the system was something like 
this. In theory the King owned everything, 
like an earthly providence; and that made for 
despotism and ''divine right," which meant in 
substance a natural authority. In one aspect 
the King was simply the one lord anointed by 
the Church, that is recognised by the ethics of 
the age. But while there was more royalty in 
theory, there could be more rebellion in prac- 
tice. Fighting was much more equal than in 
our age of munitions, and the various groups 
could arm almost instantly with bows from 
the forest or spears from the smith. Where 
men are military there is no militarism. But 



68 A Short History of England 

it is more vital that while the kingdom was in 
this sense one territorial army, the regiments 
of it were also kingdoms. The sub-units were 
also sub-loyalties. Hence the loyalist to his 
lord might be a rebel to his king; or the king 
be a demagogue delivering him from the lord. 
This tangle is responsible for the tragic pas- 
sions about betrayal, as in the case of William 
and Harold ; the alleged traitor who is always 
found to be recurrent, yet always felt to be 
exceptional. To break the tie was at once easy 
and terrible. Treason in the sense of rebel- 
lion was then really felt as treason in the sense 
of treachery, since it was desertion on a per- 
petual battlefield. Now, there was even more 
of this civil war in English than in other his- 
tory, and the more local and less logical energy 
on the whole prevailed. Whether there was 
something in those island idiosyncrasies, shape- 
less as sea mists, with which this story began, 
or whether the Roman imprint had really been 
lighter than in Gaul, the feudal undergrowth 
prevented even a full attempt to build the 
Civitas Dei, or ideal mediaeval state. What 
emerged was a compromise, which men long 
afterwards amused themselves by calling a con- 
stitution. 

There are paradoxes permissible for the re- 
dressing of a bad balance in criticism, and 



St, Edward and the Norinan Kings 69 

which may safely even be emphasised so long 
as they are not isolated. One of these I have 
called at the beginning of this chapter the 
strength of the weak kings. And there is a 
complement of it, even in this crisis of the Nor- 
man mastery, which might well be called the 
weakness of the strong kings. William of Nor- 
mandy succeeded immediately, he did not quite 
succeed ultimately; there was in his huge suc- 
cess a secret of failure that only bore fruit 
long after his death. It was certainly his single 
aim to simplify England into a popular autoc- 
racy, like that growing up in France ; with that 
aim he scattered the feudal holdings in scraps, 
demanded a direct vow from the sub-vassals 
to himself, and used any tool against the bar- 
ony, from the highest culture of the foreign 
ecclesiastics to the rudest relics of Saxon cus- 
tom. But the very parallel of France makes 
the paradox startlingly apparent. It is a prov- 
erb that the first French kings were puppets; 
that the mayor of the palace was quite inso- 
lently the king of the king. Yet it is certain 
that the puppet became an idol ; a popular idol 
of unparalleled power, before which all mayors 
and nobles bent or were broken. In France 
arose absolute government, the more because 
it'was not precisely personal government. The 
King was already a thing — like the Republic. 



70 A Short History of England 

Indeed the mediaeval Republics were rigid with 
Divine Right. In Norman England, perhaps, 
the government was too personal to be abso- 
lute. Anyhow, there is a real though recondite 
sense in which William the Conqueror was 
William the Conquered. When his two sons 
were dead, the whole country fell into a feudal 
chaos almost like that before the Conquest. In 
France the princes who had been slaves became 
something exceptional like priests ; and one of 
them became a saint. But somehow our great- 
est kings were still barons; and by that very 
energy our barons became our kings. 



VI — The Age of the Crusades 

THE last chapter began, in an apparent 
irrelevance, with the name of St. 
Edward; and this one might very 
well begin with the name of St. 
George. His first appearance, it is said, as a 
patron of our people, occurred at the instance 
of Richard Coeur de Lion during his campaign 
in Palestine; and this, as we shall see, really 
stands for a new England which might well 
have a new saint. But the Confessor is a char- 
acter in English history; whereas St. George, 
apart from his place in martyrology as a 
Roman soldier, can hardly be said to be a char- 
acter in any history. And if we wish to un- 
derstand the noblest and most neglected of 
human revolutions, we can hardly get closer 
to it than by considering this paradox, of how 
much progress and enlightenment was repre- 
sented by thus passing from a chronicle to a 
romance. 

In any intellectual corner of modernity can 
be found such a phrase as I have just read in a 
newspaper controversy: '^Salvation, like other 
good things, must not come from outside." To 

71 



72 A Short History of England 

call a spiritual thing external and not internal 
is the chief mode of modernist excommunica- 
tion. But if our subject of study is mediaeval 
and not modern, we must pit against this ap- 
parent platitude the very opposite idea. We 
must put ourselves in the posture of men 
who thought that almost every good thing came 
from outside — like good news. I confess that 
I am not impartial in my sympathies here ; and 
that the newspaper phrase I quoted strikes me 
as a blunder about the very nature of life. I 
do not, in my private capacity, believe that 
a baby gets his best physical food by sucking 
his thumb; nor that a man gets his best moral 
food by sucking his soul, and denying its de- 
pendence on God or other good things. I would 
maintain that thanks are the highest form of 
thought; and that gratitude is happiness 
doubled by wonder. But this faith in re- 
ceptiveness, and in respect for things out- 
side oneself, need here do no more than help 
me in explaining what any version of this epoch 
ought in any case to explain. In nothing is 
the modern German more modern, or more 
mad, than in his dream of finding a German 
name for everything; eating his language, or 
in other words biting his tongue. And in noth- 
ing were the mediasvals more free and sane 
than in their acceptance of names and emblems 



The Age of the Crusades 73 

from outside their most beloved limits. The 
monastery would often not only take in the 
stranger but almost canonise him. A mere ad- 
venturer like Bruce was enthroned and thanked 
as if he had really come as a knight errant. 
And a passionately patriotic community more 
often than not had a foreigner for a patron 
saint. Thus crowds of saints were Irishmen, 
but St. Patrick was not an Irishman. Thus 
as the English gradually became a nation, they 
left the numberless Saxon saints in a sense be- 
hind them, passed over by comparison not only 
the sanctity of Edward but the solid fame of 
Alfred, and invoked a half mythical hero, striv- 
ing in an eastern desert against an impossible 
monster. 

That transition and that symbol stand for 
the Crusades. In their romance and reality 
they were the first English experience of learn- 
ing, not only from the external, but the remote. 
England, like every Christian thing, had 
thriven on outer things without shame. From 
the roads of Ccesar to the churches of Lan- 
franc, it had sought its meat from God. But 
now the eagles were on the wing, scenting a 
more distant slaughter; they were seeking the 
strange things instead of receiving them. The 
English had stepped from acceptance to adven- 
ture, and the epic of their ships had begun. 



74 A Short History of England 

The scope of the great religious movement 
which swept England along with all the West 
would distend a book like this into huge dis- 
proportion, yet it would be much better to do 
so than to dismiss it in the distant and frigid 
fashion common in such short summaries. The 
inadequacy of our insular method in popular 
history is perfectly shown in the treatment of 
Richard Coeur de Lion. His tale is told with 
the implication that his departure for the Cru- 
sade was something like the escapade of a 
schoolboy running away to sea. It was, in this 
view, a pardonable or lovable prank; whereas 
in truth it was more like a responsible Eng- 
lishman now going to the Front. Christendom 
was nearly one nation, and the Front was the 
Holy Land. That Richard himself was of an 
adventurous and even romantic temper is true, 
though it is not unreasonably romantic for a 
born soldier to do the work he does best. But 
the point of the argument against insular his- 
tory is particularly illustrated here by the ab- 
sence of a continental comparison. In this case 
we have only to step across the Straits of Dover 
to find the fallacy. Philip Augustus, Richard's 
contemporary in France, had the name of a 
particularly cautious and coldly public-spirited 
statesman; yet Philip Augustus went on the 
same Crusade. The reason was, of course, that 



The Age of the Crusades 75 

the Crusades were, for all thoughtful Euro- 
peans, things of the highest statesmanship and 
the purest public spirit. 

Some six hundred years after Christianity 
sprang up in the East and swept westwards, 
another great faith arose in almost the same 
eastern lands and followed it like its gigantic 
shadow. Like a shadow, it was at once a copy 
and a contrary. We call it Islam, or the creed 
of the Moslems ; and perhaps its most explana- 
tory description is that it was the final flaming 
up of the accumulated Orientalisms, perhaps of 
the accumulated Hebraisms, gradually rejected 
as the Church grew more European, or as 
Christianity turned into Christendom. Its 
highest motive was a hatred of idols, and in its 
view Incarnation was itself an idolatry. The 
two things it persecuted were the idea of God 
being made flesh and of His being afterwards 
made wood or stone. A study of the questions 
smouldering in the track of the prairie fire of 
the Christian conversion favours the sugges- 
tion that this fanaticism against art or mythol- 
ogy was at once a development and a reaction 
from that conversion, a sort of minority report 
of the Hebraists. In this sense Islam was some- 
thing like a Christian heresy. The early here- 
sies had been full of mad reversals and eva- 
sions of the Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus 



76 A Short History of England 

from the reality of his body even at the ex- 
pense of the sincerity of his soul. And the 
Greek Iconoclasts had poured into Italy, break- 
ing the popular statues and denouncing the 
idolatry of the Pope, until routed, in a style 
sufficiently symbolic, by the sword of the father 
of Charlemagne. It was all these disappointed 
negations that took fire from the genius of 
Mahomet, and launched out of the burning 
lands a cavalry charge that nearly conquered 
the world. And if it be suggested that a note 
on such Oriental origins is rather remote from 
a history of England, the answer is that this 
book may, alas ! contain many digressions, but 
that this is not a digression. It is quite pecu- 
liarly necessary to keep in mind that this Sem- 
ite god haunted Christianity like a ghost; to 
remember it in every European corner, but es- 
pecially in our corner. If any one doubts the 
necessity, let him take a walk to all the parish 
churches in England within a radius of thirty 
miles, and ask why this stone virgin is headless 
or that coloured glass is gone. He will soon 
learn that it was lately, and in his own lanes 
and homesteads, that the ecstasy of the deserts 
returned, and his bleak northern island was 
filled with the fury of the Iconoclasts. 

It was an element in this sublime and yet 
sinister simplicity of Islam that it knew no 



The Age of the Crusades 77 

boundaries. Its very home was homeless. For 
it was born in a sandy waste among nomads, 
and it went everywhere because it came from 
nowhere. But in the Saracens of the early 
Middle Ages this nomadic quality in Islam was 
masked by a high civilisation, more scientific 
if less creatively artistic than that of contempo- 
rary Christendom. The Moslem monotheism 
was, or appeared to be, the more rationalist 
religion of the two. This rootless refinement 
was characteristically advanced in abstract 
things, of which a memory remains in the very 
name of algebra. In comparison the Christian 
civilisation was still largely instinctive, but its 
instincts were very strong and very much the 
other way. It was full of local affections, 
which found form in that system of fences 
which runs like a pattern through everything 
mediaeval, from heraldry to the holding of land. 
There was a shape and colour in all their cus- 
toms and statutes which can be seen in all their 
tabards and escutcheons; something at once 
strict and gay. This is not a departure from 
the interest in external things, but rather a 
part of it. The very welcome they would often 
give to a stranger from beyond the wall was a 
recognition of the wall. Those who think their 
own life all-sufficient do not see its limit as a 
wall, but as the end of the world. The Chinese 



78 A Short History of England 

called the white man ^'a sky-breaker." The 
mediaeval spirit loved its part in life as a part, 
not a whole ; its charter for it came from some- 
thing else. There is a joke about a Benedic- 
tine monk who used the common grace of 
Benedictiis benedicat, whereupon the unlet- 
tered Franciscan triumphantly retorted 
Franciscus Franciscat. It is something of a 
parable of mediaeval history; for if there were 
a verb Franciscare it would be an approximate 
description of what St. Francis afterwards did. 
But that more individual mysticism was only 
approaching its birth, and Benedictiis henedicat 
is very precisely the motto of the earliest me- 
disevalism. I mean that everything is blessed 
from beyond, by something which has in its 
turn been blessed from beyond again ; only the 
blessed bless. But the point which is the clue 
to the Crusades is this, that for them the be- 
yond was not the infinite, as in a modern re- 
ligion. Every beyond was a place. The mys- 
tery of locality, with all its hold on the human 
heart, was as much present in the most ethereal 
things of Christendom as it was absent from 
the most practical things of Islam. England 
would derive a thing from France, France 
from Italy, Italy from Greece, Greece from 
Palestine, Palestine from Paradise. It was 
not merely that a yeoman of Kent would have 



The Age of the Cmsades 79 

his house hallowed by the priest of the parish 
church, which was confirmed by Canterbury, 
which was confirmed by Rome. Rome her- 
self did not worship herself, as in the pagan 
age. Rome herself looked eastward to the 
mysterious cradle of her creed, to a land of 
which the very earth was called holy. And 
when she looked eastward for it she saw the 
face of Mahound. She saw standing in the 
place that was her earthly heaven a devour- 
ing giant out of the deserts, to whom all places 
were the same. 

It has been necessary thus to pause upon the 
inner emotions of the Crusade, because the 
modern English reader is widely cut off from 
these particular feelings of his fathers; and 
the real quarrel of Christendom and Islam, 
the fire-baptism of the young nations, could 
not otherwise be seized in its unique character. 
It was nothing so simple as a quarrel between 
two men who both wanted Jerusalem. It was 
the much deadlier quarrel between one man 
who wanted it and another man who could not 
see why it was wanted. The Moslem, of 
course, had his own holy places; but he has 
never felt about them as Westerns can feel 
about a field or a roof-tree; he thought of the 
holiness as holy, not of the places as places. 
The austerity which forbade him imagery, the 



80 A Short History of England 

wandering war that forbade him rest, shut 
him off from all that was breaking out and 
blossoming in our local patriotisms, just as it 
has given the Turks an empire without ever 
giving them a nation. 

Now, the effect of this adventure against a 
mighty and mysterious enemy was simply enor- 
mous in the transformation of England, as of 
all the nations that were developing side 
by side with England. Firstly, we learnt 
enormously from what the Saracen did. 
Secondly, we learnt yet more enormously 
from what the Saracen did not do. Touch- 
ing some of the good things which we 
lacked, we were fortunately able to follow 
him. But in all the good things which he 
lacked, we were confirmed like adamant to defy 
him. It may be said that Christians never 
knew how right they were till they went to 
war with Moslems. At once the most obvious 
and the most representative reaction was the 
reaction which produced the best of what we 
call Christian Art; and especially those gro- 
tesques of Gothic architecture which are not 
only alive but kicking. The East as an en- 
vironment, as an impersonal glamour, cer- 
tainly stimulated the Western mind, but stim- 
ulated it rather to break the Moslem command- 
ment than to keep it. It was as if the Chris- 



The Age of the Crusades 81 

tian were impelled like a caricaturist to cover 
all that faceless ornament with faces; to give 
heads to all those headless serpents and birds 
to all those lifeless trees. Statuary quickened 
and came to life under the veto of the enemy 
as under a benediction. The image, merely be- 
cause it was called an idol, became not only an 
ensign but a weapon. A hundredfold host of 
stone sprang up all over the shrines and streets 
of Europe. The Iconoclasts made more statues 
than they destroyed. 

The place of Coeur de Lion in popular 
fable and gossip is far more like his place in 
true history than the place of the mere de- 
nationalised ne'er-do-weel given him in our 
utilitarian school books. Indeed the vulgar 
rumour is nearly always much nearer the his- 
torical truth than the ''educated" opinion of 
to-day; for tradition is truer than fashion. 
King Richard, as the typical Crusader, did 
make a momentous difference to England by 
gaining glory in the East, instead of devoting 
himself conscientiously to domestic politics in 
the exemplary manner of King John. The 
'accident of his military genius and prestige 
gave England something which it kept for 
four hundred years, and without which it is 
incomprehensible throughout that period — the 
reputation of being in the very vanguard of 



82 A Short History of England 

chivalry. The great romances of the Round 
Table, the attachment of knighthood to the 
name of a British king, belong to this period. 
Richard was not only a knight but a trouba- 
dour; and culture and courtesy were linked up 
with the idea of English valour. The me- 
diaeval Englishman was even proud of being 
polite; which is at least no worse than being 
proud of money and bad manners, which is 
what many Englishmen in our later centuries 
have meant by their common sense. 

Chivalry might be called the baptism of 
Feudalism. It was an attempt to bring the 
justice and even the logic of the Catholic creed 
into a military system which already existed; 
to turn its discipline into an initiation and its 
inequalities into a hierarchy. To the compara- 
tive grace of the new period belongs, of course, 
that considerable cultus of the dignity of 
woman, to which the word chivalry is often 
narrowed, or perhaps exalted. This also was 
a revolt against one of the worst gaps in the 
more polished civilisation of the Saracens. 
Moslems denied even souls to women ; perhaps 
from the same instinct which recoiled from the 
sacred birth, with its inevitable glorification 
of the mother; perhaps merely because, hav- 
ing originally had tents rather than houses, 
they had slaves rather than housewives. It 



The Age of the Crusades 83 

is false to say that the chivalric view of women 
was merely an affectation, except in the sense 
in which there must always be an affectation 
where there is an ideal. It is the worst sort 
of superficiality not to see the pressure of a 
general sentiment merely because it is always 
broken up by events; the Crusade itself, for 
example, is more present and potent as a dream 
even than as a reality. From the first Plan- 
tagenet to the last Lancastrian it haunts the 
minds of English kings, giving as a back- 
ground to their battles a mirage of Palestine. 
So a devotion like that of Edward I. to his 
queen was quite a real motive in the lives of 
multitudes of his contemporaries. When 
crowds of enlightened tourists, setting forth 
to sneer at the superstitions of the continent, 
are taking tickets and labelling luggage at the 
large railway station at the west end of the 
Strand, I do not know whether they all speak 
to their wives with a more flowing courtesy 
than their fathers in Edward's time, or 
whether they pause to meditate on the legend 
of a husband's sorrow, to be found in the very 
name of Charing Cross. 

But it is a huge historical error to suppose 
that the Crusades concerned only that crust of 
society for which heraldry was an art and 
chivalry an etiquette. The direct contrary is 



84 A Short History of England 

the fact. The First Crusade especially was 
much more an unanimous popular rising than 
most that are called riots and revolutions. The 
Guilds, the great democratic systems of the 
time, often owed their increasing power to cor- 
porate fighting for the Cross; but I shall deal 
with such things later. Often it was not so 
much a levy of men as a trek of whole families, 
like new gipsies moving eastwards. And it has 
passed into a proverb that children by them- 
selves often organised a crusade as they now 
organise a charade. But we shall best realise 
the fact by fancying every Crusade as a Chil- 
dren's Crusade. They were full of all that the 
modern world worships in children, because it 
has crushed it out of men. Their lives were 
full, as the rudest remains of their vulgarest 
arts are full, of something that we all saw out 
of the nursery window. It can best be seen 
later, for instance, in the lanced and latticed 
interiors of Memling, but it is ubiquitous in 
the older and more unconscious contemporary 
art ; something that domesticated distant lands 
and made the horizon at home. They fitted 
into the corners of small houses the ends of 
the earth and the edges of the sky. Their 
perspective is rude and crazy, but it is per- 
spective; it is not the decorative flatness of 
.orientalism. In a word, their world, like a 



The Age of the Crusades 85 

child's, is full of foreshortening, as of a short 
cut to fairyland. Their maps are more pro- 
vocative than pictures. Their half -fabulous 
animals are monsters, and yet are pets. It 
is impossible to state verbally this very vivid 
atmosphere; but it was an atmosphere as well 
as an adventure. It was precisely these out- 
landish visions that truly came home to every- 
body; it was the royal councils and feudal 
quarrels that were comparatively remote. The 
Holy Land was much nearer to a plain man's 
house than Westminster, and immeasurably 
nearer than Runymede. To give a list of Eng- 
lish kings and parliaments, without pausing 
for a moment upon this prodigious presence of 
a religious transfiguration in common life, is 
something the folly of which can but faintly 
be conveyed by a more modern parallel, with 
secular ity and religion reversed. It is as if 
some Clericalist or Royalist writer should give 
a list of the Archbishops of Paris from 1750 
to 1850, noting how one died of small-pox, an- 
other of old age, another by a curious accident 
of decapitation, and throughout all his record 
should never once mention the nature, or even 
the name, of the French Revolution. 



VII — The Problem of the Plantagenets 

IT is a point of prestige with what is called 
the Higher Criticism in all branches to 
proclaim that certain popular texts and 
authorities are ^'late/' and therefore ap- 
parently worthless. Two similar events are 
always the same event, and the later alone is 
even credible. This fanaticism is often in 
mere fact mistaken; it ignores the most com- 
mon coincidences of human life, and some fu- 
ture critic will probably say that the tale of the 
Tower of Babel cannot be older than the Eiffel 
Tower, because there was certainly a confusion 
of tongues at the Paris Exhibition. Most of 
the mediaeval remains familiar to the modern 
reader are necessarily ''late,'' such as Chaucer 
or the Robin Hood ballads ; but they are none 
the less, to a wiser criticism, worthy of atten- 
tion and even trust. That which lingers after 
an epoch is generally that which lived most 
luxuriantly in it. It is an excellent habit to 
read history backwards. It is far wiser for 
a modern man to read the Middle Ages back- 
wards from Shakespeare, whom he can judge 
for himself, and who yet is crammed with the 

86 



Problem of the Plantagenets 87 

Middle Ages, than to attempt to read them 
forwards from Csedmon, of whom he can know 
nothing, and of whom even the authorities he 
must trust know very Httle. If this be true 
of Shakespeare, it is even truer, of course, 
of Chaucer. If we really want to know what 
was strongest in the twelfth century, it is no 
bad way to ask what remained of it in the 
fourteenth. When the average reader turns 
to the '^Canterbury Tales," which are still as 
amusing as Dickens, yet as mediaeval as Dur- 
ham Cathedral, what is the very first question 
to be asked ? Why, for instance, are they called 
Canterbury Tales ; and what were the pilgrims 
doing on the road to Canterbury ? They were, 
of course, taking part in a popular festival 
like a modern public holiday, though much 
more genial and leisurely. Nor are we, per- 
haps, prepared to accept it as a self-evident 
step in progress that their holidays were de- 
rived from saints, while ours are dictated by 
bankers. 

It is almost necessary to say nowadays that 
a saint means a very good man. The notion 
of an eminence merely moral, consistent with 
complete stupidity or unsuccess, is a revolu- 
tionary image grown unfamiliar by its very 
familiarity, and needing, as do so many things 
of this older society, some almost preposterous 



88 A Short History of England 

modern parallel to give its original freshness 
and point. If we entered a foreign town and 
found a pillar like the Nelson Column, we 
should be surprised to learn that the hero on 
the top of it had been famous for his politeness 
and hilarity during a chronic toothache. If a 
procession came down the street with a brass 
band and a hero on a white horse, we should 
think it odd to be told that he had been very 
patient with a half-witted maiden aunt. Yet 
some such pantomime impossibility is the only 
measure of the innovation of the Christian 
idea of a popular and recognised saint. It 
must especially be realised that while this kind 
of glory was the highest, it was also in a sense 
the lowest. The materials of it were almost 
the same as those of labour and domesticity: it 
did not need the sword or sceptre, but rather 
the staff or spade. It was the ambition of 
poverty. All this must be approximately vis- 
ualised before we catch a glimpse of the great 
effects of the story which lay behind the Can- 
terbury Pilgrimage. 

The first few lines of Chaucer's poem, to 
say nothing of thousands in the course of it, 
make it instantly plain that it was no case of 
secular revels still linked by a slight ritual to 
the name of some forgotten god, as may have 
happened in the pagan decline. Chaucer and 



Prohlem of the Plantagenets 89 

his friends did think about St. Thomas, at 
least more frequently than a clerk at Margate 
thinks about St. Lubbock. They did definitely 
believe in the bodily cures wrought for them 
through St. Thomas, at least as firmly as the 
most enlightened and progressive modern can 
believe in those of Mrs. Eddy. Who was St. 
Thomas, to whose shrine 'the whole of that 
society is thus seen in the act of moving; and 
why was he so important? If there be a streak 
of sincerity in the claim to treat social and 
democratic history, instead of a string of kings 
and battles, this is the obvious and open gate 
by which to approach the figure which dis- 
puted England with the first Plantagenet. A 
real popular history should think more of his 
popularity even than his policy. And unques- 
tionably thousands of ploughmen, carpenters, 
cooks, and yeomen, as in the motley crowd of 
Chaucer, knew a great deal about St. Thomas 
when they had never even heard of Becket. 

It would be easy to detail what followed the 
Conquest as the feudal tangle that it was, till 
a prince from Anjou repeated the unifying ef- 
fort of the Conqueror. It is found equally 
easy to write of the Red King's hunting in- 
stead of his building, which has lasted longer, 
and which he probably loved much more. It 
is easy to catalogue the questions he disputed 



90 A Short History of England 

with Anselm — leaving out the question Anselm 
cared most about, and which he asked with ex- 
plosive simplicity, as, 'Why was God a man?" 
All this is as simple as saying that a king died 
of eating lampreys, from which, however, there 
is little to learn nowadays, unless it be that 
when a modern monarch perishes of gluttony 
the newspapers seldom say so. But if we want 
to know what really happened to England in 
this dim epoch, I think it can be dimly but 
truly traced in the story of St. Thomas of 
Canterbury. 

Henry of Anjou, who brought fresh French 
blood into the monarchy, brought also a re- 
freshment of the idea for which the French 
have always stood : the idea in the Roman Law 
of something impersonal and omnipresent. It 
is the thing we smile at even in a small French 
detective story ; when Justice opens a handbag 
or Justice runs after a cab. Henry II. really 
produced this impression of being a police force 
in person ; a contemporary priest compared his 
restless vigilance to the bird and the fish of 
scripture whose way no man knoweth. King- 
hood, however, meant law and not caprice; 
its ideal at least was a justice cheap and obvi- 
ous as daylight, an atmosphere which lingers 
only in popular phrases about the King's Eng- 
lish or the King's highway. But though it 



Problem of the Plantagenets 91 

tended to be egalitarian it did not, of itself, 
tend to be humanitarian. In modern France, 
as in ancient Rome, the other name of Justice 
has sometimes been Terror. The Frenchman 
especially is always a Revolutionist — and never 
an Anarchist. Now this effort of kings like 
Henry II. to rebuild on a plan like that of the 
Roman Law was not only, of course, crossed 
and entangled by countless feudal fancies and 
feelings in themselves as well as others, it was 
also conditioned by what was the corner-stone 
of the whole civilisation. It had to happen not 
only with but within the Church. For a Church 
was to these men rather a world they lived in 
than a building to which they went. Without 
the Church the Middle Ages would have had 
no law, as without the Church the Reformation 
would have had no Bible. Many priests ex- 
pounded and embellished the Roman Law, and 
many priests supported Henry 11. And yet 
there was another element in the Church, 
stored in its first foundations like dynamite, 
and destined in every age to destroy and re- 
new the world. An idealism akin to impos- 
sibilism ran down the ages parallel to all its 
political compromises. Monasticism itself was 
the throwing off of innumerable Utopias, 
without posterity yet with perpetuity. It had, 
as was proved recurrently after corrupt epochs, 



92 A Short History of England 

a strange secret of getting poor quickly; a 
mushroom magnificence of destitution. This 
wind of revokition in the crusading time 
caught Francis in Assissi and stripped him of 
his rich garments in the street. The same 
wind of revolution suddenly smote Thomas 
Becket, King Henry's brilliant and luxurious 
Chancellor, and drove him on to an unearthly 
glory and a bloody end. 

Becket was a type of those historic times in 
which it is really very practical to be imprac- 
ticable. The quarrel which tore him from his 
friend's side cannot be appreciated in the light 
of those legal and constitutional debates which 
the misfortunes of the seventeenth century 
have made so much of in more recent history. 
To convict St. Thomas of illegality and clerical 
intrigue, when he set the law of the Church 
against that of the State, is about as adequate 
as to convict St. Francis of bad heraldry when 
he said he was the brother of the sun and 
moon. There may have been heralds stupid 
enough to say so even in that much more log- 
ical age, but it is no sufficient way of dealing 
with visions or with revolutions. St. Thomas 
of Canterbury was a great visionary and a 
great revolutionist, but so far as England was 
concerned, his revolution failed and his vision 
was not fulfilled. We are therefore told in 



Pi^ohlem of the Plantagenets 93 

the text-books little more than that he wran- 
gled with the King about certain regulations; 
the most crucial being whether "criminous 
clerks" should be punished by the State or the 
Church. And this was indeed the chief text 
of the dispute; but to realise it we must re- 
iterate what is hardest for modern England 
to understand — the nature of the Catholic 
Church when it was itself a government, and 
the permanent sense in which it was itself a 
revolution. 

It is always the first fact that escapes notice ; 
and the first fact about the Church was that 
it created a machinery of pardon, where the 
State could only work with a machinery of 
punishment. It claimed to be a divine detec- 
tive who helped the criminal to escape by a 
plea of guilty. It w'as, therefore, in the very 
nature of the institution, that when it did pun- 
ish materially it punished more lightly. If 
any modern man were put back in the Becket 
quarrel, his sympathies would certainly be torn 
in two; for if the King's scheme was the more 
rational, the Archbishop's was the more 
humane. And despite the horrors that dark- 
ened religious disputes long afterwards, this 
character was certainly in the bulk the historic 
character of Church government. It is ad- 
mitted, for instance, that things like eviction, 



94 A Short History of England 

or the harsh treatment of tenants, was prac- 
tically unknown wherever the Church was 
landlord. The principle lingered into more 
evil days in the form by which the Church 
authorities handed over culprits to the secular 
arm to be killed, even for religious offences. 
In modern romances this is treated as a mere 
hypocrisy ; but the man who treats every human 
inconsistency as a hypocrisy is himself a hypo- 
crite about his own inconsistencies. 

Our world, then, cannot understand St. 
Thomas, any more than St. Francis, without 
accepting very simply a flaming and even fan- 
tastic charity, by which the great Archbishop 
undoubtedly stands for the victims of this 
world, where the wheel of fortune grinds the 
faces of the poor. He may well have been too 
idealistic; he wished to protect the Church as 
a sort of earthly paradise, of which the rules 
might seem to him as paternal as those of 
heaven, but might well seem to the King as 
capricious as those of fairyland. But i€ the 
priest was too idealistic, the King was really 
to practical; it is intrinsically true to say he 
was too practical to succeed in practice. There 
re-enters here, and runs, I think, through all 
English history, the rather indescribable truth 
I have suggested about the Conqueror; that 
perhaps he was hardly impersonal enough for 



Problem of the Plantagenets 95 

a pure despot. The real moral of our mediceval 
story is, I think, subtly contrary to Carlyle's 
vision of a stormy strong man to hammer and 
weld the state like a smith. Our strong men 
were too strong for us, and too strong for 
themselves. They were too strong for their 
own aim of a just and equal monarchy. The 
smith broke upon the anvil the sword of state 
that he was hammering for himself. Whether 
or no this will serve as a key to the very com- 
plicated story of our kings and barons, it is 
the exact posture of Henry 11. to his rival. 
He became lawless out of sheer love of law. 
He also stood, though in a colder and more 
remote manner, for the whole people against 
feudal oppression; and if his policy had suc- 
ceeded in its purity, it would at least have 
made impossible the privilege and capitalism 
of later times. But that bodily restlessness 
which stamped and spurned the furniture was 
a symbol of him; it was some such thing that 
prevented him and his heirs from sitting as 
quietly on their throne as the heirs of St. 
Louis. He thrust again and again at the tough 
intangibility of the priests' Utopianism like a 
man fighting a ghost; he answered transcen- 
dental defiances with baser material persecu- 
tions; and, at last, on a dark and, I think, de- 
cisive day in English history, his word sent 



96 A Short History of England 

four feudal murderers into the cloisters of 
Canterbury, who went there to destroy a 
traitor and who created a saint. 

At the grave of the dead man broke forth 
what can only be called an epidemic of healing. 
For the miracles wrought there, there is the 
same evidence as for half the facts of his- 
tory; and any one denying them must deny 
them upon a dogma. But something followed 
which would seem to modern civilisation even 
more monstrous than a miracle. If the reader 
can imagine Mr. Cecil Rhodes submitting to be 
horsewhipped by a Boer in St. PauFs Ca- 
thedral, as an apology for some indefensible 
death incidental to the Jameson Raid, he will 
form but a faint idea of what was meant when 
Henry 11. was beaten by monks at the tomb 
of his vassal and enemy. The modern parallel 
called up is comic, but the truth is that me- 
diaeval actualities have a violence that does 
seem comic to our conventions. The Catholics 
of that age were driven by two dominant 
thoughts: the all-importance of penitence as 
an answer to sin, and the all-importance of 
vivid and evident external acts as a proof of 
penitence. Extravagant humiliation after ex- 
travagant pride for them restored the balance 
of sanity. The point is worth stressing, be- 
cause without it moderns make neither head 



Problem of the Plantagenets 97 

nor tail of the period. Green gravely suggests, 
for instance, of Henry's ancestor Fulk of 
Anjou, that his tyrannies and frauds were 
further blackened by '^low superstition," 
which led him to be dragged in a halter round 
a shrine, scourged and screaming for the mercy 
of God. Medisevals would simply have said 
that such a man might well scream for it, but 
his scream was the only logical comment he 
could make. But they would have quite re- 
fused to see why the scream should be added 
to the sins and not subtracted from them. They 
would have thought it simply muddle-headed 
to have the same horror at a man for be- 
ing horribly sinful and for being horribly 
sorry. 

But it may be suggested, I think, though with 
the doubt proper to ignorance, that the An- 
gevin ideal of the King's justice lost more 
by the death of St. Thomas than was instantly 
apparent in the horror of Christendom, the 
canonisation of the victim and the public pen- 
ance of the tyrant. These things indeed were 
in a sense temporary; the King recovered the 
power to judge clerics, and many later kings 
and justiciars continued the monarchical plan. 
But I would suggest, as a possible clue to puz- 
zling after events, that here and by this mur- 
derous stroke the crown lost what should have 



98 A Short History of England 

been the silent and massive support of its whole 
policy. I mean that it lost the people. 

It need not be repeated that the case for 
despotism is democratic. As a rule its cruelty 
to the strong is kindness to the weak. An auto- 
crat cannot be judged as a historical character 
by his relations with other historical charac- 
ters. His true applause comes not from the 
few actors on the lighted stage of aristocracy, 
but from that enormous audience which must 
always sit in darkness throughout the drama. 
The king who helps numberless helps nameless 
men, and when he flings his widest largesse 
he is a Christian doing good by stealth. This 
sort of monarchy was certainly a mediaeval 
ideal, nor need it necessarily fail as a reality. 
French kings were never so merciful to the 
people as when they were merciless to the 
peers ; and it is probably true that a Czar who 
was a great lord to his intimates was often a 
little father in innumerable little homes. It is 
overwhelmingly probable that such a central 
power, though it might at last have deserved 
destruction in England as in France, would in 
England as in France have prevented the few 
from seizing and holding all the wealth and 
power to this day. But in England it broke off 
short, through something of which the slaying 
of St. Thomas may well have been the supreme 



Problem of the Plantagenets 99 

example. It was something overstrained and 
startling and against the instincts of the peo- 
ple. And of what was meant in the Middle 
Ages by that very powerful and rather pe- 
culiar thing, the people, I shall speak in the next 
chapter. 

In any case this conjecture finds support in 
the ensuing events. It is not merely that, just 
as the great but personal plan of the Con- 
queror collapsed after all into the chaos of the 
Stephen transition, so the great but personal 
plan of the first Plantagenet collapsed into the 
chaos of the Barons' Wars. When all allow- 
ance is made for constitutional fictions and 
afterthoughts, it does seem likely that here 
for the first time some moral strength deserted 
the monarchy. The character of Henry's sec- 
ond son John (for Richard belongs rather to 
the last chapter) stamped it with something 
accidental and yet symbolic. It was not that 
John was a mere black blot on the pure gold 
of the Plantagenets, the texture was much 
more mixed and continuous, but he really was 
a discredited Plantagenet, and as it were a 
damaged Plantagenet. It was not that he was 
much more of a bad man than many opposed to 
him, but he was the kind of bad man whom bad 
men and good do combine to oppose. In a 
sense subtler than that of the legal and par- 



100 A Short History of England 

liamentary logic-chopping invented long after- 
wards, he certainly managed to put the Crown 
in the wrong. Nobody suggested that the 
barons of Stephen's time starved men in dun- 
geons to promote political liberty, or hung 
them up by the heels as a symbolic request for 
a free parliament. In the reign of John and 
his son it was still the barons, and not in the 
least the people, who seized the power; but 
there did begin to appear a case for their seiz- 
ing it, for contemporaries as well as constitu- 
tional historians afterwards. John, in one of 
his diplomatic doublings, had put England into 
the papal care, as an estate is put in Chancery. 
And unluckily the Pope, whose counsels had 
generally been mild and liberal, was then in 
his death-grapple with the Germanic Emperor 
and wanted every penny he could get to win. 
His winning was a blessing to Europe, but a 
curse to England, for he used the island as 
a mere treasury for this foreign war. In this 
and other matters the baronial party began 
to have something like a principle, which is 
the backbone of a policy. Much conventional 
history that connects their councils with a thing 
like our House of Commons is as far fetched 
as it would be to say that the Speaker wields 
a mace like those which the barotis brandished 
in battle. Simon de Mont fort was not an en- 



Problem of the Plantagenets 101 

thusiast for the Whig theory of the British 
Constitution, but he was an enthusiast for 
something. He founded a parHament in a fit 
of considerable absence of mind; but it was 
with true presence of mind, in the responsible 
and even religious sense which had made his 
father so savage a Crusader against heretics, 
that he laid about him with his great sword 
before he fell at Evesham. 

Magna Charta was not a step towards 
democracy, but it was a step away from des- 
potism. If we hold that double truth firmly, 
we have something like a key to the rest of 
English history. A rather loose aristocracy 
not only gained but often deserved the name of 
liberty. And the history of the English can 
be most briefly summarised by taking the 
French motto of ''Liberty, Equality, and Fra- 
ternity," and noting that the English have 
sincerely loved the first and lost the other two. 

In the contemporary complication much 
could be urged both for the Crown and the new 
and more national rally of the nobility. But 
it was a complication, whereas a miracle is a 
plain matter that any man can understand. 
The possibilities or impossibilities of St. 
Thomas Becket were left a riddle for history; 
the white flame of his audacious theocracy was 
frustrated, and his work cut short like a fairy 



102 A Short History of England 

tale left untold. But his memory passed into 
the care of the common people, and with them 
he was more active dead than alive — yes, even 
more busy. In the next chapter we shall con- 
sider what was meant in the Middle Ages by 
the common people, and how uncommon we 
should think it to-day. And in the last chap- 
ter we have already seen how in the Crusad- 
ing age the strangest things grew homely, and 
men fed on travellers' tales when there were 
no national newspapers. A many-coloured 
pageant of martyrology on numberless walls 
and windows had familiarised the most ignor- 
ant with alien cruelties in many climes; with 
a bishop flayed by Danes or a virgin boiled by 
Saracens, with one saint stoned by Jews and 
another hewn in pieces by negroes. I cannot 
think it was a small matter that among these 
images one of the most magnificent had met 
his death but lately at the hands of an Eng- 
lish monarch. There was at least something 
akin to the primitive and epical romances of 
that period in the tale of those two mighty 
friends, one of whom struck too hard and 
slew the other. It may even have been so early 
as this that something was judged in silence; 
and for the multitude rested on the Crown a 
mysterious seal of insecurity like that of Cain, 
and of exile on the English kings. 



VIII — The Meaning of Merry England 

THE mental trick by which the first 
half of English history has been 
wholly dwarfed and dehumanised is 
a very simple one. It consists in 
telling only the story of the professional de- 
stroyers and then complaining that the whole 
story is one of destruction. A king is at the 
best a sort of crowned executioner ; all govern- 
ment is an ugly necessity; and if it was then 
uglier it was for the most part merely because 
it was more difficult. What we call the Judges' 
circuits were first rather the King's raids. For 
a time the criminal class was so strong that 
ordinary civil government was conducted by 
a sort of civil war. When the social enemy was 
caught at all he was killed or savagely maimed. 
The King could not take Pentonville Prison 
about with him on wheels. I am far from 
denying that there was a real element of cruelty 
in the Middle Ages; but the point here is that 
it was concerned with one side of life, which is 
cruel at the best; and that this involved more 
cruelty for the same reason that it involved 
more courage. When we think of our an- 

103 



104i A Short History of England 

cestors as the men who inflicted tortures, we 
ought sometimes to think of them as the men 
who defied them. But the modern critic of 
medisevalism commonly looks only at these 
crooked shadows and not at the common day- 
light of the Middle Ages. When he has got 
over his indignant astonishment at the fact 
that fighters fought and that hangmen hanged, 
he assumes that any other ideas there may 
have been were inefTectual and fruitless. He 
despises the monk for avoiding the very same 
activities which he despises the warrior for 
cultivating. And he insists that the arts of 
war were sterile, without even admitting the 
possibility that the arts of peace were produc- 
tive. But the truth is that it is precisely in 
the arts of peace, and in the type of produc- 
tion, that the Middle Ages stand singular and 
unique. This is not eulogy but history; an 
informed man must recognise this productive 
peculiarity even if he happens to hate it. The 
melodramatic things currently called mediaeval 
are much older and more universal; such as 
the sport of tournament or the use of torture. 
The tournament was indeed a Christian and 
liberal advance on the gladiatorial show, since 
the lords risked themselves and not merely 
their slaves. Torture, so far from being pe- 
culiarly mediaeval, was copied from pagan 



The Meaning of Merry England 105 

Rome and its most rationalist political science ; 
and its application to others besides slaves was 
really part of the slow mediaeval extinction of 
slavery. Torture, indeed, is a logical thing 
common in states innocent of fanaticism, as 
in the great agnostic empire of China. What 
was really arresting and remarkable about the 
Middle Ages, as the Spartan discipline was 
peculiar to Sparta, or the Russian communes 
typical of Russia, was precisely its positive so- 
cial scheme of production, of the making, build- 
ing and growing of all the good things of 
life. 

For the tale told in a book like this cannot 
really touch on mediaeval England at all. The 
dynasties and the parliaments passed like a 
changing cloud and across a stable and fruit- 
ful Jandscape. The institutions which affected 
the masses can be compared to corn or fruit 
trees in one practical sense at least, that they 
grew upwards from below. There may have 
been better societies, and assuredly we have 
not to look far for worse; but it is doubtful 
if there was ever so spontaneous a society. 
We cannot do justice, for instance, to the local 
government of that epoch, even where it was 
very faulty and fragmentary, by any compari- 
sons with the plans of local government laid 
down to-day. Modern local government al- 



106 A Short History of England 

ways comes from above; it is at best granted; 
it is more often merely imposed. The modern 
English oligarchy, the modern German Em- 
pire, are necessarily more efficient in making 
municipalities upon a plan, or rather a pat- 
tern. The medisevals not only had self-govern- 
ment, but their self-government was self-made. 
They did indeed, as the central powers of the 
national monarchies grew stronger, seek and 
procure the stamp of state approval; but it 
was approval of a popular fact already in ex- 
istence. Men banded together in guilds and 
parishes long before Local Government Acts 
were dreamed of. Like charity, which was 
worked in the same way, their Home Rule 
began at home. The reactions of recent cen- 
turies have left most educated men bankrupt 
of the corporate imagination required even 
to imagine this. They only think of a mob as 
a thing that breaks things — even if they admit 
it is right to break them. But the mob made 
these things. An artist mocked as many- 
headed, an artist with many eyes and hands, 
created these masterpieces. And if the mod- 
ern sceptic, in his detestation of the democratic 
ideal, complains of my calling them master- 
pieces, a simple answer will for the moment 
serve. It is enough to reply that the very 
word "masterpiece'' is borrowed from the 



The Meaning of Merry England 107 

terminology of the mediaeval craftsmen. But 
such points in the Guild System can be con- 
sidered a little later; here we are only con- 
cerned with the quite spontaneous springing 
upwards of all these social institutions, such 
as they were. They rose in the streets like a 
silent rebellion ; like a still and statuesque riot. 
In modern constitutional countries there are 
practically no political institutions thus given 
by the people; all are received by the people. 
There is only one thing that stands in our 
midst, attenuated and threatened, but en- 
throned in some power like a ghost of the Mid- 
dle Ages: the Trades Unions. 

In agriculture, what had happened to the 
land was like a universal landslide. But by a 
prodigy beyond the catastrophes of geology 
it may be said that the land had slid uphill. 
Rural civilisation was on a wholly new and 
much higher level ; yet there were no great so- 
cial convulsions or apparently even great so- 
cial campaigns to explain it. It is possibly a 
solitary instance in history of men thus fall- 
ing upwards; at least of outcasts falling on 
their feet or vagrants straying into the prom- 
ised land. Such a thing could not be and was 
not a mere accident; yet, if we go by conscious 
political plans, it was something like a miracle. 
There had appeared, like a subterranean race 



108 A Short History of England 

cast up to the sun, something unknown to the 
august civihsation of the Roman Empire — a 
peasantry. At the beginning of the Dark Ages 
the great pagan cosmopolitan society now 
grown Christian was as much a slave state as 
old South Carolina. By the fourteenth cen- 
tury it was almost as much a state of peasant 
proprietors as modern France. No laws had 
been passed against slavery; no dogmas even 
had condemned it by definition; no war had 
been waged against it, no new race or ruling 
caste had repudiated it ; but it was gone. This 
startling and silent transformation is perhaps 
the best measure of the pressure of popular life 
in the Middle Ages, of how fast it was making 
new things in its spiritual factory. Like every- 
thing else in the mediaeval revolution, from its 
cathedrals to its ballads, it was as anonymous 
as it was enormous. It is admitted that the 
conscious and active emancipators everywhere 
were the parish priests and the religious broth- 
erhoods ; but no name among them has survived 
and no man of them has reaped his reward in 
this world. Countless Clarksons and innumer- 
able Wilberforces, without political machinery 
or public fame, worked at death-beds and 
confessionals in all the villages of Europe; and 
the vast system of slavery vanished. It was 
probably the widest work ever done which was 



The Meaning of Merry England 109 

voluntary on both sides ; and the Middle Ages 
was in this and other things the age of volun- 
teers. It is possible enough to state roughly 
the stages through v^hich the thing passed ; but 
such a statement does not explain the loosen- 
ing of the grip of the great slave-owners; and 
it cannot be explained except psychologically. 
The Catholic type of Christianity was not 
merely an element, it was a climate; and in 
that climate the slave would not grow. I have 
already suggested, touching that transforma- 
tion of the Roman Empire which was the back- 
ground of all these centuries, how a mystical 
view of man's dignity must have this effect. 
A table that walked and talked, or a stool that 
flew with wings out of window, would be about 
as workable a thing as an immortal chattel. 
But though here as everywhere the spirit ex- 
plains the processes, and the processes cannot 
even plausibly explain the spirit, these proc- 
esses involve two very practical points, with- 
out which we cannot understand how this great 
popular civilisation was created — or how it 
was destroyed. 

What we call the manors were originally the 
villae of the pagan lords, each with its popula- 
tion of slaves. Under this process, however 
it be explained, what had occurred was the 
diminishment of the lords' claim to the whole 



110 A Short History of England 

profit of a slave estate, by which it became a 
claim to the profit of part of it, and dwindled 
at last to certain dues or customary payments 
to the lord, having paid which the slave could 
enjoy not only the use of the land but the 
profit of it. It must be remembered that over 
a great part, and especially very important 
parts, of the whole territory, the lords were 
abbots, magistrates elected by a mystical com- 
munism and themselves often of peasant birth. 
Men not only obtained a fair amount of justice 
under their care, but a fair amount of free- 
dom even from their carelessness. But two 
details of the development are very vital. First, 
as has been hinted elsewhere, the slave was 
long in the intermediate status of a serf. This 
meant that while the land was entitled to the 
services of the man, he was equally entitled 
to the support of the land. He could 
not be evicted; he could not even, in the mod- 
ern fashion, have his rent raised. At the be- 
ginning it was merely that the slave was owned, 
but at least he could not be disowned. At the 
end he had really become a small landlord, 
merely because it was not the lord that owned 
him, but the land. It is hardly unsafe to sug- 
gest that in this (by one of the paradoxes of 
this extraordinary period) the very fixity of 
serfdom was a service to freedom. The new 



The Meaning of Merry England 111 

peasant inherited something of the stability of 
the slave. He did not come to life in a compet- 
itive scramble where everybody was trying to 
snatch his freedom from him. He found him- 
self among neighbours who already regarded 
his presence as normal and his frontiers as 
natural frontiers, and among whom all-power- 
ful customs crushed all experiments in com- 
petition. By a trick or overturn no romancer 
has dared to put in a tale, this prisoner had 
become the governor of his own prison. For 
a little time it was almost true that an Eng- 
lishman's house was his castle, because it 
had been built strong enough to be his dun- 
geon. 

The other notable element was this: that 
when the produce of the land began by custom 
to be cut up and only partially transmitted to 
the lord, the remainder was generally subdi- 
vided into two types of property. One the 
serfs enjoyed severally, in private patches, 
while the other they enjoyed in common, and 
generally in common with the lord. Thus 
arose the momentously important mediaeval in- 
stitutions of the Common Land, owned side 
by side with private land. It was an alterna- 
tive and a refuge. The medisevals, except 
when they were monks, were none of them 
Communists; but they were all, as it were, 



112 A Short History of England 

potential Communists. It is typical of the dark 
and dehumanised picture now drawn of the 
period that our romances constantly describe 
a broken man as falling back on the forests 
and the outlaw's den, but never describe him 
as falling back on the common land, which was 
a much more common incident. Mediaevalism 
believed in mending its broken men ; and as the 
idea existed in the communal life for monks, 
it existed in the communal land for peasants. 
It was their great green hospital, their free 
and airy workhouse. A Common was not a 
naked and negative thing like the scrub or 
heath we call a Common on the edges of the 
suburbs. It was a reserve of wealth like a 
reserve of grain in a barn; it was deliberately 
kept back as a balance, as we talk of a bal- 
ance at the bank. Now these provisions for 
a healthier distribution of property would by 
themselves show any man of imagination that 
a real moral effort had been made towards so- 
cial justice; that it could not have been mere 
evolutionary accident that slowly turned the 
slave into a serf, and the serf into a peasant 
proprietor. But if anybody still thinks that 
mere blind luck, without any groping for the 
light, had somehow brought about the peasant 
condition in place of the agrarian slave estate, 
he has only to turn to what was happening in 



The Meaning of Merry England 113 

all the other callings and affairs of humanity. 
Then he will cease to doubt. For he will find 
the same mediaeval men busy upon a social 
scheme which points as plainly in effect to pity 
and a craving for equality. And it is a sys- 
tem which could no more be produced by acci- 
dent than one of their cathedrals could be built 
by an earthquake. 

All work beyond the primary work of agri- 
culture was guarded by the egalitarian vig- 
ilance of the Guilds. It is hard to find any 
term to measure the distance between this sys- 
tem and modern society; one can only ap- 
proach it first by the faint traces it has left. 
Our daily life is littered with a debris of the 
Middle Ages, especially of dead words which 
no longer carry their meaning. I have already 
suggested one example. We hardly call up the 
picture of a return to Christian Communism 
whenever we mention Wimbledon Common. 
This truth descends to such trifles as the titles 
which we write on letters and postcards. The 
puzzling and truncated monosyllable '^Esq." is 
a pathetic relic of a remote evolution from 
chivalry to snobbery. No two historic things 
could well be more diff'erent than an esquire 
and a squire. The first was above all things 
an incomplete and probationary position — the 
tadpole of knighthood; the second is above all 



114 A Short History of England 

things a complete and assured position — the 
status of the owners and rulers of rural Eng- 
land throughout recent centuries. Our esquires 
did not win their estates till they had given 
up any particular fancy for winning their 
spurs. Esquire does not mean squire, and esq. 
does not mean anything. But it remains on our 
letters a little riddle in pen and ink and 
an indecipherable hieroglyph twisted by the 
strange turns of our history, which have turned 
a military discipline into a pacific oligarchy, 
and that into a mere plutocracy at last. And 
there are similar historic riddles to be un- 
picked in the similar forms of social address. 
There is something singularly forlorn about 
the modern word ^'Mister." Even in sound it 
has a simpering feebleness which marks the 
shrivelling of the strong word from which 
it came. Nor, indeed, is the symbol of the 
mere sound inaccurate. I remember seeing a 
German story of Samson in which he bore the 
unassuming name of Simson, which surely 
shows Samson very much shorn. There is 
something of the same dismal diminuendo in 
the evolution of a Master into a Mister. 

The very vital importance of the word 
"Master" is this. A Guild was, very broadly 
speaking, a Trades Union in which every man 
was his own employer. That is, a man could 



The Meaning of Merry England 115 

not work at any trade unless he would join the 
league and accept the laws of that trade; but 
he worked in his own shop with his own tools, 
and the whole profit went to himself. But the 
word ''employer'' marks a modern deficiency 
which makes the modern use of the word 
''master" quite inexact. A master meant some- 
thing quite other and greater than a "boss.'' 
It meant a master of the work, where it now 
means only a master of the workmen. It is an 
elementary character of capitalism that a ship- 
owner need not know the right end of a ship, 
or a landowner have even seen the landscape, 
that the owner of a gold-mine may be inter- 
ested in nothing but old pewter, or the owner 
of a railway travel exclusively in balloons. He 
may be a more successful capitalist if he has a 
hobby of his own business; he is often a more 
successful capitalist if he has the sense to leave 
it to a manager; but economically he can con- 
trol the business because he is a capitalist, not 
because he has any kind of hobby or any kind 
of sense. The highest grade in the Guild sys- 
tem was a Master, and it meant a mastery 
of the business. To take the term created by 
the colleges in the same epoch, all the mediaeval 
bosses were Masters of Arts. The other 
grades were the journeyman and the appren- 
tice; but like the corresponding degrees at the 



116 A Short History of England 

universities, they were grades through which 
every common man could pass. They were not 
social classes ; they were degrees and not castes. 
This is the whole point of the recurrent ro- 
mance about the apprentice marrying his 
master's daughter. The master would not be 
surprised at such a thing, any more than an 
M.A. would swell with aristocratic indignation 
when his daughter married a B.A. 

When we pass from the strictly educational 
hierarchy to the strictly egalitarian ideal, we 
find again that the remains of the thing to- 
day are so distorted and disconnected as to 
be comic. There are City Companies which 
inherit the coats of arms and the immense rela- 
tive wealth of the old Guilds, and inherit noth- 
ing else. Even what is good about them is 
not what was good about the Guilds. In one 
case we shall find something like a Worship- 
ful Company of Bricklayers, in which, it is 
unnecessary to say, there is not a single brick- 
layer or anybody who has ever known a brick- 
layer, but in which the senior partners of a 
few big businesses in the City, with a few 
faded military men with a taste in cookery, tell 
each other in after-dinner speeches that it has 
been the glory of their lives to make allegorical 
bricks without straw. In another case we shall 
find a Worshipful Company of Whitewashers 



The Meaning of Merry England 117 

who do deserve their name, in the sense that 
many of them employ a large number of other 
people to whitewash. These Companies sup- 
port large charities and often doubtless very 
valuable charities; but their object is quite 
different from that of the old charities of the 
Guilds. The aim of the Guild charities was 
the same as the aim of the Common Land. It 
was to resist inequality — or, as some earnest 
old gentlemen of the last generation would 
probably put it, to resist evolution. It was to 
ensure, not only that bricklaying should sur- 
vive and succeed, but that every bricklayer 
should survive and succeed. It sought to re- 
build the ruins of any bricklayer, and to give 
any faded whitewasher a new white coat. It 
was the whole aim of the Guilds to cobble their 
cobblers like their shoes and clout their 
clothiers with their clothes; to strengthen the 
weakest link, or go after the hundredth sheep; 
in short, to keep the row of little shops un- 
broken like a line of battle. It resisted the 
growth of a big shop like the growth of a 
dragon. Now, even the whitewashers of the 
Whitewashers Company will not pretend that 
it exists to prevent a small shop being swal- 
lowed by a big shop, or that it has done any- 
thing whatever to prevent it. At the best the 
kindness it would show to a bankrupt white- 



118 d Short History of England 

washer would be a kind of compensation; it 
would not be reinstatement; it would not be 
the restoration of status in an industrial sys- 
tem. So careful of the type it seems, so care- 
less of the single life; and by that very mod- 
ern evolutionary philosophy the type itself has 
been destroyed. The old Guilds, with the same 
object of equality, of course, insisted peremp- 
torily upon the same level system of payment 
and treatment which is a point of complaint 
against the modern Trades Unions. But they 
insisted also, as the Trades Unions cannot do, 
upon a high standard of craftsmanship, which 
still astonishes the world in the corners of per- 
ishing buildings or the colours of broken glass. 
There is no artist or art critic who will not 
concede, however distant his own style from 
the Gothic school, that there was in this time 
a nameless but universal artistic touch in the 
moulding of the very tools of life. Accident 
has preserved the rudest sticks and stools and 
pots and pans which have suggestive shapes 
as if they were possessed not by devils but by 
elves. For they were, indeed, as compared 
with subsequent systems, produced in the in- 
credible fairyland of a free country. 

That the most mediaeval of modern institu- 
tions, the Trades Unions, do not fight for the 
same ideal of aesthetic finish is true and cer- 



The Meaning of Merry England 119 

tainly tragic; but to make it a matter of blame 
is wholly to misunderstand the tragedy. The 
Trades Unions are confederations of men with- 
out property, seeking to balance its absence by 
numbers and the necessary character of their 
labour. The Guilds were confederations of 
men with property, seeking to ensure each man 
in the possession of that property. That is, 
of course, the only condition of affairs in which 
property can properly be said to exist at all. 
We should not speak of a negro community in 
which most men were white, but the rare ne- 
groes were giants. We should not conceive 
a married community in which most men were 
bachelors, and three men had harems. A mar- 
ried community means a community where 
most people are married; not a community 
where one or two people are very much mar- 
ried. A propertied community means a com- 
munity where most people have property; not 
a community where there are a few capitalists. 
But in fact the Guildsmen (as also, for that 
matter, the serfs, semi-serfs and peasants) 
were much richer than can be realised even 
from the fact that the Guilds protected the pos- 
session of houses, tools, and just payments. 
The surplus is self-evident upon any just study 
of the prices of the period, when all deductions 
have been made, of course, for the different 



120 A Short History of England 

value of the actual coinage. When a man 
could get a goose or a gallon of ale for one or 
two of the smallest and commonest coins, the 
matter is in no way affected by the name of 
those coins. Even where the individual wealth 
was severely limited, the collective wealth was 
very large — the wealth of the Guilds, of the 
parishes, and especially of the monastic estates. 
It is important to remember this fact in the 
subsequent history of England. 

The next fact to note is that the local gov- 
ernment grew out of things like the Guild sys- 
tem, and not the system from the govern- 
ment. In sketching the sound principles of 
this lost society, I shall not, of course, be sup- 
posed by any sane person to be describing a 
moral paradise, or to be implying that it was 
free from the faults and fights and sorrows 
that harass human life in all times, and cer- 
tainly not least in our own time. There was 
a fair amount of rioting and fighting in con- 
nection with the Guilds; and there was espe- 
cially for some time a combative rivalry be- 
tween the guilds of merchants who sold things 
and those of craftsmen who made them, a con- 
flict in which the craftsmen on the whole pre- 
vailed. But whichever party may have been 
predominant, it was the heads of the Guild who 
became the heads of the town, and not vice 



The Meaning of Merry England 121 

versa. The stiff survivals of this once very 
spontaneous uprising can again be seen in the 
now anomalous constitution of the Lord Mayor 
and the Livery of the City of London. We 
are told so monotonously that the government 
of our fathers reposed upon arms, that it is 
valid to insist that this, their most intimate 
and everyday sort of government, was wholly 
based upon tools; a government in which the 
w^orkman's tool became the sceptre. Blake, 
in one of his symbolic fantasies, suggests that 
in the Golden Age the gold and gems should 
be taken from the hilt of the sword and put 
upon the handle of the plough. But something 
very like this did happen in the interlude of 
this mediaeval democracy, fermenting under 
the crust of mediaeval monarchy and aristoc- 
racy; where productive implements often took 
on the pomp of heraldry. The Guilds often 
exhibited emblems and pageantry so compact 
of their most prosaic uses, that we can only 
parallel them by imagining armorial tabards, 
or even religious vestments, woven out of a 
navvy's corduroys or a coster's pearl buttons. 
Two more points must be briefly added ; and 
the rough sketch of this now foreign and even 
fantastic state will be as complete as it can be 
made here. Both refer to the links between 
this popular life and the politics which are 



122 A Short History of England 

conventially the whole of history. The first, 
and for that age the most evident, is the Char- 
ter. To recur once more to the parallel of 
Trades Unions, as convenient for the casual 
reader of to-day, the Charter of a Guild 
roughly corresponded to that ''recognition" for 
which the railway men and other trades union- 
ists asked some years ago, without success. 
By this they had the authority of the King, the 
central or national government; and this was 
of great moral weight with medisevals, who 
always conceived of freedom as a positive 
status, not as a negative escape : they had none 
of the modern romanticism which makes lib- 
erty akin to loneliness. Their view remains in 
the phrase about giving a man the freedom 
of a city: they had no desire to give him the 
freedom of a wilderness. To say that they 
had also the authority of the Church is some- 
thing of an understatement; for religion ran 
like a rich thread through the rude tapestry 
of these popular things while they were still 
merely popular ; and many a trade society must 
have had a patron saint long before it had a 
royal seal. The other point is that it was from 
these municipal groups already in existence 
that the first men were chosen for the largest 
and perhaps the last of the great mediaeval ex- 
periments : the Parliament. 



The Meaning of Merry England 123 

We have all read at school that Simon de 
Montfort and Edward I., when they first sum- 
moned Commons to council, chiefly as advisers 
on local taxation, called ''two burgesses" from 
every town. If we had read a little more close- 
ly, those simple words would have given away 
the whole secret of the lost mediaeval civilisa- 
tion. We had only to ask what burgesses were, 
and whether they grew on trees. We should 
immediately have discovered that England was 
full of little parliaments, out of which the 
great parliament was made. And if it be a 
matter of wonder that the great council (still 
called in quaint archaism by its old title of the 
House of Commons) is the only one of these 
popular or elective corporations of which we 
hear much in our books of history, the explana- 
tion, I fear, is simple and a little sad. It is 
that the Parliament was the one among these 
mediaeval creations w^hich ultimately consented 
to betray and to destroy the rest. 



IX — Nationality and the French Wars 

IF any one wishes to know what we mean 
when we say that Christendom was and 
is one culture, or one civilisation, there 
is a rough but plain way of putting it. 
It is by asking what is the most common, or 
rather the most commonplace, of all the uses 
of the word ''Christian." There is, of course, 
the highest use of all; but it has nowadays 
many other uses. Sometimes a Christian 
means an Evangelical. Sometimes, and more 
recently, a Christian means a Quaker. Some- 
times a Christian means a modest person who 
believes that he bears a resemblance to Christ. 
But it has long had one meaning in casual 
speech among common people, and it means a 
culture or a civilisation. Ben Gunn on Treas- 
ure Island did not actually say to Jim Haw- 
kins, "I feel myself out of touch with a cer- 
tain type of civilisation"; but he did say, "I 
haven't tasted Christian food." The old wives 
in a village looking at a lady with short hair 
and trousers do not indeed say, 'We perceive 
a divergence between her culture and our 
own"; but they do say, ''Why can't she dress 

124 



Nationality and the French Wars 125 

like a Christian ?" That the sentiment has thus 
soaked down to the simplest and even stupidest 
daily talk is but one evidence that Christendom 
v^as a very real thing. But it was also, as we 
have seen, a very localised thing, especially 
in the Middle Ages. And that very lively 
localism the Christian faith and affections en- 
couraged led at last to an excessive and ex- 
clusive parochialism. There were rival shrines 
of the same saint, and a sort of duel between 
two statues of the same divinity. By a process 
it is now our difficult duty to follow, a real 
estrangement between European peoples be- 
gan. Men began to feel that foreigners did 
not eat or drink like Christians, and even, when 
the philosophic schism came, to doubt if they 
were Christians. 

There was, indeed, much more than this in- 
volved. While the internal structure of me- 
disevalism was thus parochial and largely pop- 
ular, in the greater affairs, and especially the 
external affairs, such as peace and war, most 
(though by no means all) of what was me- 
dieval was monarchical. To see what the 
kings came to mean we must glance back at 
the great background, as of darkness and day- 
break, against which the first figures of our 
history have already appeared. That back- 
ground was the war with the barbarians. 



126 A Short History of England 

While it lasted Christendom was not only one 
nation but more like one city — and a besieged 
city. Wessex was but one wall or Paris one 
tower of it; and in one tongue and spirit Bede 
might have chronicled the siege of Paris or 
Abbo sung the song of Alfred. What fol- 
lowed was a conquest and a conversion ; all the 
end of the Dark Ages and the dawn of me- 
disevalism is full of the evangelising of bar- 
barism. And it is the paradox of the Cru- 
sades that though the Saracen was superfi- 
cially more civilised than the Christian, it was 
a sound instinct which saw him also to be in 
spirit a destroyer. In the simpler case of 
northern heathenry the civilisation spread with 
a simpler progress. But it was not till the end 
of the Middle Ages, and close on the Reforma- 
tion, that the people of Prussia, the wild land 
lying beyond Germany, were baptised at all. A 
flippant person, if he permitted himself a pro- 
fane confusion with vaccination, might al- 
most be inclined to suggest that for some rea- 
son it didn't *'take'' even then. 

The barbarian peril was thus brought under 
bit by bit, and even in the case of Islam the 
alien power which could not be crushed was 
evidently curbed. The Crusades became hope- 
less, but they also became needless. As these 
fears faded the princes of Europe, who had 



Nationality and the French Wars 127 

come together to face them, were left facing 
each other. They had more leisure to find 
that their own captaincies clashed; but this 
would easily have been overruled, or would 
have produced a petty riot, had not the true 
creative spontaneity, of which we have spoken 
in the local life, tended to real variety. Roy- 
alties found they were representatives almost 
without knowing it ; and many a king insisting 
on a genealogical tree or a title-deed found he 
spoke for the forests and the songs of a whole 
country-side. In England especially the transi- 
tion is typified in the accident which raised to 
the throne one of the noblest men of the Mid- 
dle Ages. 

Edward I. came clad in all the splendours of 
his epoch. He had taken the Cross and fought 
the Saracens; he had been the only worthy 
foe of Simon de Montfort in those baronial 
wars which, as we have seen, were the first 
sign (however faint) of a serious theory that 
England should be ruled by its barons rather 
than its kings. He proceeded, like Simon de 
Montfort, and more solidly, to develop the 
great mediaeval institution of a parliament. As 
has been said, it was superimposed on the ex- 
isting parish democracies, and was first merely 
the summoning of local representatives to 
advise on local taxation. Indeed its rise was 



128 A Short History of England 

one with the rise of what we now call taxa- 
tion; and there is thus a thread of theory lead- 
ing to its latter claims to have the sole right 
of taxing. But in the beginning it was an in- 
strument of the most equitable kings, and not- 
ably an instrument of Edward I. He often 
quarrelled with his parliaments and may some- 
times have displeased his people (which has 
never been at all the same thing), but on the 
whole he was supremely the representative 
sovereign. In this connection one curious and 
difficult question may be considered here, 
though it marks the end of a story that began 
with the Norman Conquest. It is pretty cer- 
tain that he was never more truly a representa- 
tive king, one might say a republican king, 
than in the fact that he expelled the Jews. The 
problem is so much misunderstood and mixed 
with notions of a stupid spite against a gifted 
and historic race as such, that we must pause 
for a paragraph upon it. 

The Jews in the Middle Ages were as power- 
ful as they were unpopular. They were the 
capitalists of the age, the men with wealth 
banked ready for use. It is very tenable that 
in this way they were useful ; it is certain that 
in this way they were used. It is also quite 
fair to say that in this way they were ill-used. 
The ill-usage was not indeed that suggested at 



Nationality and the French Wars 129 

random in romances, which mostly revolve on 
the one idea that their teeth were pulled out. 
Those who know this as a story about King 
John generally do not know the rather impor- 
tant fact that it was a story against King John. 
It is probably doubtful; it was only insisted 
on as exceptional ; and it was, by that very in- 
sistence, obviously regarded as disreputable. 
But the real unfairness of the Jews' position 
was deeper and more distressing to a sensitive 
and highly civilised people. They might rea- 
sonably say that Christian kings and nobles, 
and even Christian popes and bishops, used for 
Christian purposes (such as the Crusades and 
the cathedrals) the money that could only be 
accumulated in such mountains by a usury they 
inconsistently denounced as unchristian; and 
then, when worse times came, gave up the 
Jew to the fury of the poor, whom that useful 
usury had ruined. That was the real case 
for the Jew; and no doubt he really felt him- 
self oppressed. Unfortunately it was the case 
for the Christians that they, with at least equal 
reason, felt him as the oppressor; and that 
mutual charge of tyranny is the Semitic trou- 
ble in all times. It is certain that in popular 
sentiment, this Anti-Semitism was not excused 
as uncharitableness, but simply regarded as 
charity. Chaucer puts his curse on Hebrew 



130 A SJiort History of England 

cruelty into the mouth of the soft-hearted 
prioress, who wept when she saw a mouse in 
a trap ; and it was when Edward, breaking the 
rule by which the rulers had hitherto fostered 
their bankers' wealth, flung the alien financiers 
out of the land, that his people probably saw 
him most plainly at once as a knight errant and 
a tender father of his people. 

Whatever the merits of this qu'estion, such a 
portrait of Edward was far from false. He 
was the most just and conscientious type of 
mediaeval monarch; and it is exactly this fact 
that brings into relief the new^ force which was 
to cross his path and in strife with which he 
died. While he was just, he was also emi- 
nently legal. And it must be remembered, if 
we would not merely read back ourselves into 
the past, that much of the dispute of the time 
was legal; the adjustment of dynastic and 
feudal differences not yet felt to be anything 
else. In this spirit Edward was asked to arbi- 
trate by the rival claimants to the Scottish 
crown ; and in this sense he seems to have arbi- 
trated quite honestly. But his legal, or, as 
some would say, pedantic mind made the pro- 
viso that the Scottish king as such was al- 
ready under his suzerainty, and he probably 
never understood the spirit he called up 



Nationality and the French Wars 131 

against him ; for that spirit had as yet no name. 
We call it to-day Nationalism. Scotland re- 
sisted; and the adventures of an outlawed 
knight named Wallace soon furnished it with 
one of those legends which are more impor- 
tant than history. In a way that was then 
at least equally practical, the Catholic priests 
of Scotland became especially the patriotic and 
Anti-English party; as indeed they remained 
even throughout the Reformation. Wallace 
was defeated and executed; but the heather 
was already on fire; and the espousal of the 
new national cause by one of Edward's own 
knights named Bruce, seemed to the old king 
a mere betrayal of feudal equity. He died in 
a final fury at the head of a new invasion upon 
the very border of Scotland. With his last 
words the great king commanded that his 
bones should be borne in front of the battle; 
and the bones, which were of gigantic size, 
were eventually buried with the epitaph, ''Here 
lies Edward the Tall, who was the hammer of 
the Scots.'' It was a true epitaph, but in a 
sense exactly opposite to its intention. He was 
their hammer, but he did not break but make 
them; for he smote them on an anvil and he 
forged them into a sword. 

That coincidence or course of events, which 
must often be remarked in this story, by which 



132 A Short History of England 

(for whatever reason) our most powerful 
kings did not somehow leave their power se- 
cure, showed itself in the next reign, when 
the baronial quarrels were resumed and the 
northern kingdom, under Bruce, cut itself 
finally free by the stroke of Bannockburn. 
Otherwise the reign is a mere interlude, and it 
is with the succeeding one that we find the 
new national tendency yet futher developed. 
The great French wars, in which England won 
so much glory, were opened by Edward III., 
and grew more and more nationalist. But even 
to feel the transition of the time we must first 
realise that the third Edward made as strictly 
legal and dynastic a claim to France as the first 
Edward had made to Scotland; the claim was 
far weaker in substance, but it was equally con- 
ventional in form. He thought, or said, he 
had a claim on a kingdom as a squire might 
say he had a claim on an estate; superficially 
it was an affair for the English and French 
lawyers. To read into this that the people 
were sheep bought and sold is to misunder- 
stand all mediaeval history ; sheep have no trade 
union. The English arms owed much of their 
force to the class of the free yeomen; and the 
success of the infantry, especially of the arch- 
ery, largely stood for that popular element 
which had already unhorsed the high French 



Nationality and the French Wars 133 

chivalry at Courtrai. But the point is this; 
that while the lawyers were talking about the 
Salic Law, the soldiers, who would once have 
been talking about guild law or glebe law, were 
already talking about English law and French 
law. The French were first in this tendency 
to see something outside the township, the 
trade brotherhood, the feudal dues, or the vil- 
lage common. The whole history of the 
change can be seen in the fact that the French 
had early begun to call the nation the Greater 
Land. France was the first of nations and has 
remained the norm of nations, the only one 
which is a nation and nothing else. But in the 
collision the English grew equally corporate; 
and a true patriotic applause probably hailed 
the victories of Crecy and Poitiers, as it cer- 
tainly hailed the later victory of Agincourt. 
The latter did not indeed occur until after an 
interval of internal revolutions in England, 
which will be considered on a later page; but 
as regards the growth of nationalism, the 
French wars were continuous. And the Eng- 
lish tradition that followed after Agincourt 
was continuous also. It is embodied in rude 
and spirited ballads long before the Elizabeth- 
ans. The Henry V. of Shakespeare is not in- 
deed the Henry V. of history; yet he is more 
historic. He is not only a saner and more 



134 A Short History of England 

genial but a more important person. For the 
tradition of the whole adventure was not that 
of Henry, but of the populace who turned 
Henry into Harry. There were a thousand 
Harries in the army at Agincourt, and not 
one. For the figure that Shakespeare framed 
out of the legends of the great victory is largely 
the figure that all men saw as the Englishman 
of the Aliddle Ages. He did not really talk in 
poetry, like Shakespeare's hero, but he would 
have liked to. Not being able to do so, he sang; 
and the English people principally appear in 
contemporary impressions as the singing peo- 
ple. They were evidently not only expansive 
but exaggerative ; and perhaps it was not only 
in battle that they drew the long bow. That 
fine farcical imagery, which has descended to 
the comic songs and common speech of the 
English poor even to-day, had its happy in- 
fancy when England thus became a nation; 
though the modern poor, under the pressure 
of economic progress, have partly lost the gai- 
ety and kept only the humour. But in that 
early April of patriotism the new unity of the 
State still sat lightly upon them ; and a cobbler 
in Henry's army, who would at home have 
thought first that it was the day of St. Crispin 
of the Cobblers, might truly as well as sincerely 
have hailed the splintering of the French lances 



Nationality and the French Wars 135 

in a storm of arrows, and cried, ''St. George 
for Merry England." 

Human things are uncomfortably complex, 
and while it was the April of patriotism it was 
the Autumn of mediaeval society. In the next 
chapter I shall try to trace the forces that were 
disintegrating the civilisation; and even here, 
after the first victories, it is necessary to insist 
on the bitterness and barren ambition that 
showed itself more and more in the later stages, 
as the long French wars dragged on. France 
was at the time far less happy than England 
— wasted by the treason of its nobles and the 
weakness of its kings almost as much as by the 
invasion of the islanders. And yet it was this 
very despair and humiliation that seemed at 
last to rend the sky and let in the light of what 
it is hard for the coldest historian to call any- 
thing but a miracle. 

It may be this apparent miracle that has ap- 
parently made Nationalism eternal. It may be 
conjectured, though the question is too difficult 
to be developed here, that there was something 
in the great moral change which turned the 
Roman Empire into Christendom, by which 
each great thing, to which it afterwards gave 
birth was baptised into a promise, or at least 
into a hope of permanence. It may be that each 
of its ideas was, as it were, mixed with immor- 



136 A Short History of England 

tality. Certainly something of this kind can be 
seen in the conception which turned marriage 
from a contract into a sacrament. But what- 
ever the cause, it is certain that even for the 
most secular types of our own time their rela- 
tion to their native land has become not con- 
tractual but sacramental. We may say that 
flags are rags, that frontiers are fictions, but 
the very men who have said it for half their 
lives are dying for a rag, and being rent in 
pieces for a fiction even as I write. When the 
battle-trumpet blew in 19 14 modern humanity 
had grouped itself into nations almost before 
it knew what it had done. If the same sound 
is heard a thousand years hence, there is no 
sign in the world to suggest to any rational 
man that humanity will not do exactly the same 
thing. But even if this great and strange de- 
velopment be not enduring, the point is that 
it is felt as enduring. It is hard to give a 
definition of loyalty, but perhaps we come near 
it if we call it the thing which operates where 
an obligation is felt to be unlimited. And the 
minimum of duty or even decency asked of a 
patriot is the maximum that is asked by the 
most miraculous view of marriage. The rec- 
ognised reality of patriotism is not mere citi- 
zenship; the recognised reality of patriotism is 
for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in 



Nationality and the French Wars 137 

sickness and in health, in national growth and 
glory and in national disgrace and decline; it 
is not to travel in the ship of state as a pas- 
senger, and if need be to go down with the 
ship. 

It is needless to tell here again the tale of 
that earthquake episode in which a clearance in 
the earth and sky, above the confusion and 
abasement of the crowns, showed the com- 
manding figure of a woman of the people. She 
was, in her own living loneliness, a French 
Revolution. She was the proof that a certain 
power was not in the French kings or in the 
French knights, but in the French. But the 
fact that she saw something above her that was 
other than the sky, the fact that she lived the 
life of a saint and died the death of a martyr, 
probably stamped the new national sentiment 
with a sacred seal. And the fact that she 
fought for a defeated country, and, even 
though it was victorious, was herself ulti- 
mately defeated, defines that darker element of 
devotion of which I spoke above, which makes 
even pessimism consistent with patriotism. It 
is more appropriate in this place to consider the 
ultimate reaction of this sacrifice upon the ro- 
mance and the realities of England. 

I have never counted it a patriotic part to 
plaster my own country with conventional and 



138 A Short History of England 

unconvincing compliments ; but no one can un- 
derstand England who does not understand 
that such an episode as this, in which she was 
so clearly in the wrong, has yet been ultimately 
linked up with a curious quality in which she 
is rather unusually in the right. No one can- 
didly comparing us with other countries can 
say we have specially failed to build the sepul- 
chres of the prophets we stoned, or even the 
prophets who stoned us. The English histori- 
cal tradition has at least a loose large-minded- 
ness which always finally falls into the praise 
not only of great foreigners but great foes. 
Often along with much injustice it has an il- 
logical generosity; and while it will dismiss a 
great people with mere ignorance, it treats a 
great personality with hearty hero-worship. 
There are more examples than one even in this 
chapter, for our books may well make out Wal- 
lace a better man than he was, as they after- 
wards assigned to Washington an even better 
cause than he had. Thackeray smiled at Miss 
Jane Porter's picture of Wallace, going into 
war weeping with a cambric pocket-handker- 
chief ; but her attitude was more English and 
not less accurate. For her idealisation was, if 
anything, nearer the truth than Thackeray's 
own notion of a medisevalism of hypocritical 
hogs in armour. Edward, who figures as a 



Nationality and the French Wars 139 

tyrant, could weep with compassion; and it is 
probable enough that Wallace wept, with or 
without a pocket-handkerchief. Moreover, her 
romance was a reality, the reality of national- 
ism, and she knew much more about the Scot- 
tish patriots ages before her time than Thack- 
eray did about the Irish patriots immediately 
under his nose. Thackeray was a great man; 
but in that matter he was a very small man, 
and indeed an invisible one. The cases of 
Wallace and Washington and many others are 
here only mentioned, however, to suggest an 
eccentric magnanimity which surely balances 
some of our prejudices. We have done many 
foolish things, but we have at least done one 
fine thing; we have whitewashed our worst 
enemies. If we have done this for a bold Scot- 
tish raider and a vigorous Virginian slave- 
holder, it may at least show that we are not 
likely to fail in our final appreciation of the 
one white figure in the motley processions of 
war. I believe there to be in modern England 
something like a universal enthusiasm on this 
subject. We have seen a great English critic 
write a book about this heroine, in opposition 
to a great French critic, solely in order to blame 
him for not having praised her enough. And 
I do not believe there lives an Englishman now 
who, if he had the offer of being an English- 



140 A Short History of England 

man then, would not discard his chance of rid- 
ing as the crowned conqueror at the head of all 
the spears of Agincourt, if he could be that 
English common soldier of whom tradition tells 
that he broke his spear asunder to bind it into 
a cross for Joan of Arc. 



X — The War of the Usurpers 



THE poet Pope, though a friend of 
the greatest of Tory Democrats, 
BoHngbroke, necessarily lived in a 
world in which even Toryism was 
Whiggish. And the Whig as a wit never ex- 
pressed his political point more clearly than in 
Pope's line which ran: ^^The right divine of 
kings to govern wrong." It will be apparent, 
when I deal with that period, that I do not 
palliate the real unreason in divine right as 
Filmer and some of the pedantic cavaliers con- 
strued it. They professed the impossible ideal 
of "non-resistance" to any national and legiti- 
mate power ; though I cannot see that even that 
was so servile and superstitious as the more 
modern ideal of '^non-resistance" even to a for- 
eign and lawless power. But the seventeenth 
century was an age of sects, that is of fads; 
and the Filmerites made a fad of divine right. 
Its roots were older, equally religious but much 
more realistic ; and though tangled with many 
other and even opposite things of the Middle 
Ages, ramify through all the changes we have 
now to consider. The connection can hardly 

141 



142 A Short History of England 

be stated better than by taking Pope's easy 
epigram and pointing out that it is, after all, 
very weak in philosophy. ''The right divine of 
kings to govern wrong,'' considered as a sneer, 
really evades all that we mean by "a right." 
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the 
same as to be right in doing it. What Pope 
says satirically about a divine right is what 
we all say quite seriously about a human right. 
If a man has a right to vote, has he not a right 
to vote wrong? If a man has a right to choose 
his wife, has he not a right to choose wrong? 
I have a right to express the opinion which I 
am now setting down ; but I should hesitate to 
make the controversial claim that this proves 
the opinion to be right. 

Now, mediaeval monarchy, though only one. 
aspect of mediaeval rule, was roughly repre- 
sented in the idea that the ruler had a right to 
rule as a voter has a right to vote. He might 
govern wrong, but unless he governed horribly 
and extravagantly wrong, he retained his posi- 
tion of right ; as a private man retains his right 
to marriage and locomotion unless he goes hor- 
ribly and extravagantly off his head. It was 
not really even so simple as this; for the Middle 
Ages were not, as it is often the fashion to 
fancy, under a single and steely discipline. 
They were very controversial and therefore 



The War of the Usurpers 143 

very complex ; and it is easy, by isolating items 
whether about jus divinmn or primus inter 
pares, to maintain that the medi?evals were 
almost anything; it has been seriously main- 
tained that 'they were all Germans. But it is 
true that the influence of the Church, though 
by no means of all the great churchmen, en- 
couraged the sense of a sort of sacrament of 
government, which was meant to make the 
monarch terrible and therefore often made the 
man tyrannical. The disadvantage of such 
despotism is obvious enough. The precise na- 
ture of its advantage must be better under- 
stood than it is, not for its own sake so much 
as for the story we have now to tell. 

The advantage of "divine right," or irre- 
movable legitimacy, is this : that there is a limit 
to the ambitions of the rich. ''Roi ne puis" ; 
the royal power, whether it was or was not the 
power of heaven, was in one respect like the 
power of heaven. It was not for sale. Consti- 
tutional moralists have often implied that a 
tyrant and a rabble have the same vices. It 
has perhaps been less noticed that a tyrant and 
a rabble most emphatically have the same vir- 
tues. And one virtue which they very markedly 
share is that neither tyrants nor rabbles are 
snobs ; they do not care a button what they do 
to wealthy people. It is true that tyranny was 



144 A Short History of England 

sometimes treated as coming from the heavens 
almost in the lesser and more literal sense of 
coming from the sky ; a man no more expected 
to be the king than to be the west wind or the 
morning star. But at least no wicked miller 
can chain the wind to turn only his own mill; 
no pedantic scholar can trim the morning star 
to be his own reading-lamp. Yet something 
very like this is what really happened to Eng- 
land in the later Middle Ages; and the first 
sign of it, I fancy, was the fall of Richard II. 
Shakespeare's historical plays are something 
truer than historical, they are traditional; the 
living memory of many things lingered, though 
the memory of others was lost He is right in 
making Richard II. incarnate the claim to di- 
vine right ; and Bolingbroke the baronial ambi- 
tion which ultimately broke up the old mediaeval 
order. But divine right had become at once 
drier and more fantastic by the time of the 
Tudors. Shakespeare could not recover the 
fresh and popular part of the thing; for he 
came at a later stage in a process of stiffening 
which is the main thing to be studied in later 
medisevalism. Richard himself was possibly a 
wayward and exasperating prince; it might 
well be the weak link that snapped in the strong 
chain of the Plantagenets. There may have 
been a real case against the coup d'etat which 



The War of the Usurpers 145 

he effected in 1397, and his kinsman Henry of 
Bolingbroke may have had strong sections of 
disappointed opinion on his side when he ef- 
fected in 1399 the first true usurpation in Eng- 
Hsh history. But if we wish to understand 
that larger tradition which even Shakespeare 
had lost, we must glance back at something 
which befell Richard even in the first years of 
his reign. It was certainly the greatest event 
of his reign; and it was possibly the greatest 
event of all the reigns which are rapidly con- 
sidered in this book. The real English people, 
the men who work with their hands, lifted their 
hands to strike their masters, probably for the 
first and certainly for the last time in history. 
Pagan slavery had slowly perished, not so 
much by decaying as by developing into some- 
thing better. In one sense it did not die, but 
rather came to life. The slave-owner was like 
a man who should set up a row of sticks for a 
fence, and then find they had struck root and 
were budding into small trees. They would be 
at once more valuable and less manageable, es- 
pecially less portable; and such a difference 
between a stick and a tree was precisely the 
difference betwen a slave and a serf — or even 
the free peasant which the serf seemed rapidly 
tending to become. It was, in the best sense 
of a battered phrase, a social evolution, and it 



146 A Short History of England 

had the great evil of one. The evil was that 
while it was essentially orderly, it was still lit- 
erally lawless. That is, the emancipation of 
the commons had already advanced very far, 
but it had not yet advanced far enough to be 
embodied in a law. The custom was "unwrit- 
ten," like the British Constitution, and (like 
that evolutionary, not to say evasive entity) 
could always be overridden by the rich, who 
now drive their great coaches through Acts of 
Parliament. The new peasant was still legally 
a slave, and was to learn it by one of those 
turns of fortune which confound a foolish faith 
in the common sense of unwritten constitutions. 
The French Wars gradually grew to be almost 
as much of a scourge to England as they were 
to France. England was despoiled by her own 
victories; luxury and poverty increased at the 
extremes of society; and, by a process more 
proper to an ensuing chapter, the balance of the 
better medisevalism was lost. Finally, a furi- 
ous plague, called the Black Death, burst like 
a blast on the land, thinning the population 
and throwing the work of the world into ruin. 
There was a shortage of labour ; a difficulty of 
getting luxuries ; and the great lords did what 
one would expect them to do. They became 
lawyers, and upholders of the letter of the law. 
They appealed to a rule already long obsolete, 



The War of the Usurpers 147 

to drive the serf back to the more direct servi- 
tude of the Dark Ages. They announced their 
decision to the people, and the people rose in 
arms. 

The two dramatic stories v^hich connect Wat 
Tyler, doubtfully with the beginning, and defi- 
nitely with the end of the revolt, are far from 
unimportant, despite the desire of our present 
prosaic historians to pretend that all dramatic 
stories are unimportant. The tale of Tyler's 
first blow is significant in the sense that it is 
not only dramatic but domestic. It avenged 
an insult to the family, and made the legend of 
the whole riot, whatever its incidental indecen- 
cies, a sort of demonstration on behalf of de- 
cency. This is important; for the dignity of 
the poor is almost unmeaning in modern de- 
bates; and an inspector need only bring a 
printed form and a few long w^ords to do the 
same thing without having his head broken. 
The occasion of the protest, and the form which 
the feudal reaction had first taken, was a Poll 
Tax; but this was but a part of a general proc- 
ess of pressing the population of servile labour, 
which fully explains the ferocious language 
held by the government after the rising had 
failed; the language in which it threatened to 
make the state of the serf more servile than 
before. The facts attending the failure in ques- 



148 A Short History of England 

tion are less in dispute. The mediaeval popu- 
lace showed considerable military energy and 
co-operation, stormed its way to London, and 
was met outside the city by a company con- 
taining the King and the Lord Mayor, who 
were forced to consent to a parley. The treach- 
erous stabbing of Tyler by the Mayor gave the 
signal for battle and massacre on the spot. 
The peasants closed in roaring, "They have 
killed our leader" ; when a strange thing hap- 
pened ; something which gives us a fleeting and 
a final glimpse of the crowned sacramental men 
of the Middle Ages. For one wild moment 
divine right was divine. 

The King was no more than a boy ; his very 
voice must have rung out to that multitude 
almost like the voice of a child. But the power 
of his fathers and the great Christendom from 
which he came fell in some strange fashion 
upon him ; and riding out alone before the peo- 
ple, he cried out, ''I am your leader" ; and him- 
self promised to grant them all they asked. 
That promise was afterwards broken ; but those 
who see in the breach of it the mere fickleness 
of the young and frivolous king, are not only 
shallow but utterly ignorant interpreters of 
the whole trend of that time. The point that 
must be seized, if subsequent things are to be 
seen as they are, is that Parliament certainly 



The War of the Usurpers 149 

encouraged, and Parliament almost certainly 
obliged, the King to repudiate the people. For 
when, after the rejoicing revolutionists had dis- 
armed and were betrayed, the King urged a 
humane compromise on the Parliament, the 
Parliament furiously refused it. Already Par- 
liament is not merely a governing body but a 
governing class. Parliament was as contemp- 
tuous of the peasants in the fourteenth as of the 
Chartists in the nineteenth century. This coun- 
cil, first summoned by the king like juries and 
many other things, to get from plain men rather 
reluctant evidence about taxation, has already 
become an object of ambition, and is, .therefore, 
an aristocracy. There is already war, in this 
case literally to the knife, between the Com- 
mons with a large C and the commons with a 
small one. Talking about the knife, it is not- 
able that the murderer of Tyler was not a mere 
noble but an elective magistrate of the mercan- 
tile oligarchy of London; though there is, of 
course, no truth in the tale that his blood- 
stained dagger figures on the arms of the City 
of London. The mediseval Londoners were 
quite capable of assassinating a man, but not 
of sticking so dirty a knife into the neighbour- 
hood of the cross of their Redeemer, in the place 
which is really occupied by the sword of St. 
Paul. 



150 A Short History of England 

It is remarked above that Parliament was 
now an aristocracy, being an object of ambi- 
tion. The truth is, perhaps, more subtle than 
this; but if ever men yearn to serve on juries 
we may probably guess that juries are not 
longer popular. Anyhow, this must be kept in 
mind, as against the opposite idea of the just 
divinum or fixed authority, if we would appre- 
ciate the fall of Richard. If the thing which 
dethroned him was a rebellion, it was a rebel- 
lion of the Parliament, of the thing that had 
just proved much more pitiless than he towards 
a rebellion of the people. But this is not the 
main point. The point is that by the removal 
of Richard, a step above the Parliament became 
possible for the first time. The transition was 
tremendous ; the crown became an object of am- 
bition. That which one could snatch another 
could snatch from him; that which the House 
of Lancaster held 'merely by force the House 
of York could take from it by force. The spell 
of an undethronable thing seated out of reach 
was broken, and for three unhappy generations 
adventurers strove and stumbled on a stairway 
slippery with blood, above which was some- 
thing new in the mediaeval imagination, an 
empty throne. 

It is obvious that the insecurity of the Lan- 
castrian usurper, largely because he was a 



The War of the Usurpers 151 

usurper, is the clue to many things, some of 
which we should now call good, some bad, all 
of which we should probably call good or bad 
with the excessive facility with which we dis- 
miss distant things. It led the Lancastrian 
House to lean on Parliament, which was the 
mixed matter we have already seen. It may 
have been in some ways good for the monarchy, 
to be checked and challenged by an institution 
which at least kept something of the old fresh- 
ness and freedom of speech. It was almost 
certainly bad for the Parliament, making it yet 
more the ally of the mere ambitious noble, of 
which we shall see much later. It also led the 
Lancastrian House to lean on patriotism, which 
was perhaps more popular; to make English 
the tongue of the court for the first time, and 
to reopen the French wars with the fine flag- 
waving of Agincourt. It led it again to lean 
on the Church, or rather, perhaps, on the higher 
clergy, and that in the least worthy aspect of 
clericalism. A certain morbidity which more 
and more darkened the end of medisevalism 
showed itself in new and more careful cruelties 
against the last crop of heresies. A slight 
knowledge of the philosophy of these heresies 
will lend little support to the notion that they 
were in themselves prophetic of the Reforma- 
tion. It is hard to see how anybody can call 



152 A Sliort History of England 

Wycliffe a Protestant unless he call Palagius 
or Arius a Protestant; and if John Ball was a 
Reformer, Latimer was not a Reformer. But 
though the new heresies did not even hint at 
the beginning of English Protestantism, they 
did, perhaps, hint at the end of English Cathol- 
icism. Cobham did not light a candle to be 
handed on to Nonconformist chapels; but 
Arundel did light a torch, and put it to his own 
church. Such real unpopularity as did in time 
attach to the old religious system, and which 
afterwards became a true national tradition 
against Mary, was doubtless started by the 
diseased energy of these fifteenth-century 
bishops. Persecution can be a philosophy, and 
a defensible philosophy, but with some of these 
men persecution was rather a perversion. 
Across the channel, one of them was presiding 
at the trial of Joan of Arc. 

But this perversion, this diseased energy, is 
the power in all the epoch that follows the fall 
of Richard II., and especially in those feuds 
that found so ironic an imagery in English 
roses — and thorns. The foreshortening of 
such a backward glance as this book can alone 
claim to be, forbids any entrance into the mili- 
tary mazes of the wars of York and Lancaster, 
or any attempt to follow the thrilling recoveries 
and revenges which filled the lives of Warwick 



TJie War of the UsurjJers 153 

the Kingmaker and the warlike widow of 
Henry V. The rivals were not, indeed, as is 
sometimes exaggeratively implied, fighting for 
nothing, or even (like the lion and the unicorn) 
merely fighting for the crown. The shadow 
of a moral difference can still be traced even 
in that stormy twilight of a heroic time. But 
when we have said that Lancaster stood, on the 
whole, for the new notion of a king propped by 
parliaments and powerful bishops, and York, 
on the whole, for the remains of the older 
idea of a king who permits nothing to come 
between him and his people, we have said ev- 
erything of permanent political interest that 
could be traced by counting all the bows of Bar- 
net or all the lances of Tewkesbury. But this 
truth, that there was something which can only 
vaguely be called Tory about the Yorkists, has 
at least one interest, that it lends a justifiable 
romance to the last and most remarkable figure 
of the fighting House of York, with whose fall 
the Wars of the Roses ended. 

n we desire at all to catch the strange col- 
ours of the sunset of the Middle Ages, to see 
what had changed yet not wholly killed chiv- 
alry, there is no better study than the riddle of 
Richard HI. Of course, scarcely a line of him 
was like the caricature with which his much 
meaner successor placarded the world when he 



154i A Short History of England 

was dead. He was not even a hunchback; he 
had one shoulder sHghtly higher than the other, 
probably the effect of his furious swordsman- 
ship on a naturally slender and sensitive frame. 
Yet his soul, if not his body, haunts us some- 
how as the crooked shadow of a straight knight 
of better days. He was not an ogre shedding 
rivers of blood; some of the men he executed 
deserved it as much as any men of that wicked 
time; and even the tale of his murdered neph- 
ews is not certain, and is told by those who also 
tell us he was born with tusks and was orig- 
inally covered with hair. Yet a crimson cloud 
cannot be dispelled from his memory, and, so 
tainted is the very air of that time with car- 
nage, that we cannot say he was incapable even 
of the things of which he may have been inno- 
cent. Whether or no he was a good man, he 
was apparently a good king and even a popu- 
lar one; yet we think of him vaguely, and not, 
I fancy, untruly, as on sufferance. He antici- 
pated the Renaissance in an abnormal enthus- 
iasm for art and music, and he seems to have 
held to the old paths of religion and charity. 
He did not pluck perpetually at his sword and 
dagger because his only pleasure was in cutting 
throats; he probably did it because he was 
nervous. It was the age of our first portrait- 
painting, and a fine contemporary portrait of 



The War of the Usurpers 155 

him throws a more plausible light on this par- 
ticular detail. For it shows him touching, and 
probably twisting, a ring on his finger, the very 
act of a high-strung personality who would also 
fidget with a dagger. And in his face, as there 
painted, we can study all that has made it 
w^orth while to pause so long upon his name; 
an atmosphere very different from everything 
before and after. The face has a remarkable 
intellectual beauty ; but there is something else 
on the face that is hardly in itself either good 
or evil, and that thing is death; the death of an 
epoch, the death of a great civilisation, the 
death of something which once sang to the sun 
in the canticle of St. Francis and sailed to the 
ends of the earth in the ships of the First Cru- 
sade, but which in peace narrowed and turned 
its weapons inwards, wounded its own breth- 
ren, broke its own loyalties, gambled for the 
crown, and grew feverish even about the creed, 
and has this one grace among its dying virtues, 
that its valour is the last to die. 

But whatever else may have been bad or good 
about Richard of Gloucester, there was a touch 
about him which makes him truly the last of 
the mediaeval kings. It is expressed in the one 
word which he cried aloud as he struck down 
foe after foe in the last charge at Bosworth — 
treason. For him, as for the first Norman 



156 A Short History of England 

kings, treason was the same as treachery; and 
in this case at least it was the same as treach- 
ery. When his nobles deserted him before the 
battle, he did not regard it as a new political 
combination, but as the sin of false friends and 
faithless servants. Using his own voice like 
the trumpet of a herald, he challenged his rival 
to a fight as personal as that of two paladins of 
Charlemagne. His rival did not reply, and was 
not likely to reply. The modern world had 
begun. The call echoed unanswered down the 
ages; for since that day no English king has 
fought after that fashion. Having slain many, 
he was himself slain and his diminished force 
destroyed. So ended the war of the usurpers; 
and the last and most doubtful of all the usurp- 
ers, a wanderer from the Welsh marches, a 
knight from nowhere, found the crown of Eng- 
land under a bush of thorn. 



XI — The Rebellion of the Rich 

SIR THOMAS MORE, apart from any 
arguments about the more mystical 
meshes in which he was ultimately 
caught and killed, will be hailed by all 
as a hero of the New Learning; that great 
dawn of a more rational daylight which for so 
many made medioevalism seem a mere dark- 
ness. Whatever we think of his appreciation 
of the Reformation, there will be no dispute 
about his appreciation of the Renascence. He 
was above all things a Humanist and a very 
human one. He was even in many ways very 
modern, which some rather erroneously sup- 
pose to be the same as being human; he was 
also humane, in the sense of humanitarian. 
He sketched an ideal, or rather perhaps a fan- 
ciful social system, with something of the in- 
genuity of Mr. H. G. Wells, but essentially 
with much more than the flippancy attributed 
to Mr. Bernard Shaw. It is not fair to charge 
the Utopian notions upon his morality; but 
their subjects and suggestions mark what ( for 
want of a better word) we can only call his 
modernism. Thus the immortality of animals 

157 



158 A Short History of England 

is the sort of transcendentalism which savours 
of evolution ; and the grosser jest about the pre- 
liminaries of marriage might be taken quite 
seriously by the students of Eugenics. He 
suggested a sort of pacifism — though the Uto- 
pians had a quaint way of achieving it. In 
short, while he was, with his friend Erasmus, 
a satirist of mediaeval abuses, few would now 
deny that Protestantism would be too narrow 
rather than too broad for him. If he was 
obviously not a Protestant, there are few Prot- 
estants who would deny him the name of a 
Reformer. But he was an innovator in things 
more alluring to modern minds than theology ; 
he was partly what we should call a Neo-Pa- 
gan. His friend Colet summed up that escape 
from medisevalism which might be called the 
passage from bad Latin to good Greek. In our 
loose modern debates they are lumped together ; 
but Greek learning was the growth of this 
time; there had always been a popular Latin, 
if a dog-Latin. It would be nearer the truth 
to call the medisevals bi-lingual than to call 
their Latin a dead language. Greek never, of 
course, became so general a possession; but 
for the man who got it, it is not too much to 
say that he felt as if he were in the open air 
for the first time. Much of this Greek spirit 
was reflected in More; its universality, its ur- 



The Rebellion of the Rich 159 

banity, its balance of buoyant reason and cool 
curiosity. It is even probable that he shared 
some of the excesses and errors of taste which 
inevitably infected the splendid intellectualism 
of the reaction against the Middle Ages; we 
can imagine him thinking gargoyles Gothic, in 
the sense of barbaric, or even failing to be 
stirred, as Sydney was, by the trumpet of 
^'Chevy Chase." The wealth of the ancient 
heathen world, in wit, loveliness, and civic 
heroism, had so recently been revealed to that 
generation in its dazzling profusion and per- 
fection, that it might seem a trifle if they did 
here and there an injustice to the relics of the 
Dark Ages. When, therefore, we look at the j 
world with the eyes of More we are looking 
from the widest windows of that time; looking 
over an English landscape seen for the first 
time very equally, in the level light of the sun 
at morning. For what he saw was England of 
the Renascence ; England passing from the me- ^ 
diseval to the modern. Thus he looked forth, 
and saw many things and said many things; 
they w^ere all worthy and many witty; but he 
said one thing which is at once a horrible fancy 
and a homely and practical fact. He said, as 
he looked over that landscape, '*Sheep are eat- 
ing men." 

This singular summary of the great epoch of 



160 A Short History of England 

our emancipation and enlightenment is not the 
fact usually put first in such very curt historical 
accounts of it. It has nothing to do with the 
translation of the Bible, or the character of 
Henry VIIL, or the characters of Henry 
Vin/s wives, or the triangular debates be- 
tween Henry and Luther and the Pope. It was 
not Popish sheep who were eating Protestant 
men, or vice versa; nor did Henry, at any 
period of his own brief and rather bewildering 
papacy, have martyrs eaten by lambs as the 
heathen had them eaten by lions. What More 
meant^ of course, by this picturesque expres- 
sion, was that an intensive type of agriculture 
was giving way to a very extensive type of 
pasture. Great spaces of England which had 
hitherto been cut up into the commonwealth of 
a number of farmers were being laid under the 
sovereignty of a solitary shepherd. The point 
has been put, by a touch of epigram rather in 
the manner of More himself, by Mr. J. Stephen, 
in a striking essay now, I think, only to be 
found in the back files of The New Witness. 
He enunciated the paradox that the very much 
admired individual, who made two blades of 
grass grow instead of one, was a murderer. 
In the same article, Mr. Stephen traced the true 
moral origins of this movement, which led to 
the growing of so much grass and the murder. 



The Rebellion of the Rich 161 

or at any rate the destruction, of so much hu- 
manity. He traced it, and every true record of 
that transformation traces it, to the growth of 
a new refinement, in a sense of more rational 
refinement, in the governing class. The mc- 
di<Tval lord had been, by comparison, a coarse 
fellow ; he had merely lived in the largest kind 
of farm-house after the fashion of the largest 
kind of farmer. He drank wine when he could, 
but he was quite ready to drink ale ; and science 
had not yet smoothed his paths with petrol. At 
a time later than this, one of the greatest ladies 
of England writes to her husband that she can- 
not come to him because her carriage horses 
are pulling the plough. In the true Middle 
Ages the greatest men were even more rudely 
hampered, but in the time of Henry VHI. the 
transformation was beginning. In the next 
generation a phrase was common which is one 
of the keys of the time, and is very much the 
key to these more ambitious territorial schemes. 
This or that great lord was said to be "Italian- 
ate." It meant subtler shapes of beauty, deli- 
cate and ductile glass, gold and silver not 
treated as barbaric stones, but rather as stems 
and wreaths of molten metal, mirrors, cards 
and such trinkets bearing a load of beauty; it 
meant the perfection of trifles. It was not, as 
in popular Gothic craftsmanship, the almost 



162 A Short History of England 

unconscious touch of art upon all necessary 
things : rather it was the pouring of the whole 
soul of passionately conscious art especially 
into unnecessary things. Luxury was made 
alive with a soul. We must remember this real 
thirst for beauty; for it is an explanation— 
and an excuse. 

The old barony had indeed been thinned by 
the civil wars that closed at Bosworth, and 
curtailed by the economical and crafty policy 
of that unkingly king, Henry VII. He was 
himself a ^'new man/' and we shall see the 
barons largely give place to a whole nobility 
of new men. But even the older families al- 
ready had their faces set in the newer direc- 
tion. Some of them, the Howards, for in- 
stance, may be said to have figured both as old 
and new families. In any case the spirit of the 
whole upper class can be described as increas- 
ingly new. The English aristocracy, which is 
the chief creation of the Reformation, is un- 
deniably entitled to a certain praise which is 
now almost universally regarded as very high 
praise. It was always progressive. Aristo- 
crats are accused of being proud of their an- 
cestors; it can truly be said that English 
aristocrats have rather been proud of their 
descendants. For their descendants they 
planned huge foundations and piled mountains 



The Rebellion of the Rich 163 

of wealth; for their descendants they fought 
for a higher and higher place in the govern- 
ment of the state ; for their descendants, above 
all, they nourished every new science or scheme 
of social philosophy. They seized the vast eco- 
nomic chances of pasturage; but they also 
drained the fens. They swept away the priests, 
but they condescended to the philosophers. As 
the new Tudor house passes through its gene- 
rations a new and more rationalist civilisation 
is being made ; scholars are criticising authen- 
tic texts ; sceptics are discrediting not only pop- 
ish saints but pagan philosophers; specialists 
are analysing and rationalising traditions, and 
sheep are eating men. 

We have seen that in the fourteenth century 
in England there was a real revolution of the 
poor. It very nearly succeeded; and I need 
not conceal the conviction that it would have 
been the best possible thing for all of us if it 
had entirely succeeded. If Richard II. had 
really sprung into the saddle of Wat Tyler, or 
rather if his Parliament had not unhorsed him 
when he had got there, if he had confirmed the 
fact of the new peasant freedom by some form 
of royal authority as it was already common 
to confirm the fact of the Trade Unions by the 
form of a royal charter, our country would 
probably have had as happy a history as is 



164 A Short History of England 

possible to human nature. The Renascence, 
when it came, would have come as popular 
education and not the culture of a club of aes- 
thetics. The New Learning might have been 
as democratic as the old learning in the old 
days of mediaeval Paris and Oxford. The ex- 
quisite artistry of the school of Cellini might 
have been but the highest grade of the craft 
of a guild. The Shakespearean drama might 
have been acted by workmen on wooden stages 
set up in the street like Punch and Judy, the 
finer fulfilment of the miracle play as it was 
acted by a guild. The players need not have 
been "the king's servants," but their own mas- 
ters. The great Renascence might have been 
liberal with its liberal education. If this be a 
fancy, it is at least one that cannot be dis- 
proved; the mediaeval revolution was too un- 
successful at the beginning for any one to show 
that it need have been unsuccessful in the end. 
The feudal Parliament prevailed, and pushed 
back the peasants at least into their dubious 
and half -developed status. More than this it 
would be exaggerative to say, and a mere an- 
ticipation of the really decisive events after- 
wards. When Henry VIII. came to the throne 
the guilds were perhaps checked but apparently 
unchanged, and even the peasants had probably 
regained ground ; many were still theoretically 



The Rebellion of the Rich 165 

serfs, but largely under the easy landlordism 
of the abbots; the mediaeval system still stood. 
It might, for all we know, have begun to grow 
again ; but all such speculations are swamped in 
new and very strange things. The failure of 
the revolution of the poor was ultimately fol- 
lowed by a counter-revolution; a successful 
revolution of the rich. 

The apparent pivot of it was, in certain 
events, political and even personal. They 
roughly resolve themselves into two : the mar- 
riages of Henry VIII. and the affair of the 
monasteries. The marriages of Henry VIII. 
have long been a popular and even a stale joke ; 
and there is a truth of tradition in the joke, as 
there is in almost any joke if it is sufficiently 
popular, and indeed if it is sufficiently stale. 
A jocular thing never lives to be stale unless 
it is also serious. Henry was popular in his 
first days, and even foreign contemporaries 
give us quite a glorious picture of a young 
prince of the Renascence, radiant with all the 
new accomplishments. In his last days he was 
something very like a maniac; he no longer 
inspired love, and even when he inspired fear, 
it was rather the fear of a niad dog than of a 
watch-dog. In this change doubtless the in- 
consistency and even ignominy of his Blue- 
beard weddings played a great part. And it is 



166 A Short History of England 

but just to him to say that, perhaps with the 
exception of the first and the last, he was al- 
most as unlucky in his wives as they were in 
their husband. But it was undoubtedly the 
affair of the first divorce that broke the back 
of his honour, and incidentally broke a very 
large number of other more valuable and uni- 
versal things. To feel the meaning of his fury 
we must realise that he did not regard himself 
as the enemy but rather as the friend of the 
Pope; there is a shadow of the old story of 
Becket. He had defended the Pope in diplo- 
macy and the Church in controversy ; and when 
he wearied of his queen and took a passionate 
fancy to one of her ladies, Anne Boleyn, he 
vaguely felt that a rather cynical concession, 
in that age of cynical concessions, might very 
well be made to him by a friend. But it is part 
of that high inconsistency which is the fate of 
the Christian faith in human hands, that no 
man knows when the higher side of it will 
really be uppermost, if only for an instant ; and 
that the worst ages of the Church will not do or 
say something, as if by accident, that is worthy 
of the best. Anyhow, for whatever reason, 
Henry sought to lean upon the cushions of Leo 
and found he had struck his arm upon the rock 
of Peter. The Pope denied the new marriage, 
and Henry, in a storm and darkness of anger, 



The Rebellion of the Mich 167 

dissolved all the old relations with the Papacy. 
It is probable that he did not clearly know how 
much he was doing then ; and it is very tenable 
that we do not know it now. He certainly did 
not think he was Anti-Catholic; and, in one 
rather ridiculous sense, we can hardly say that 
he thought he was anti-papal, since he appar- 
ently thought he was a pope. From this day 
really dates something that played a certain 
part in history, the more modern doctrine of 
the divine right of kings, widely different from 
the mediaeval one. It is a matter which fur- 
ther embarrasses the open question about the 
continuity of Catholic things in Anglicanism, 
for it was a new note and yet one struck by 
the older party. The supremacy of the King 
over the English national Church was not, un- 
fortunately, merely a fad of the King, but be- 
came partly, and for one period, a fad of the 
Church. But apart from all controverted ques- 
tions, there is at least a human and historic 
sense in which the continuity of our past is 
broken perilously at this point. Henry not 
only cut off England from Europe, but what 
was even more important, he cut off England 
from England. 

The great divorce brought down Wolsey, 
the mighty minister who had held the scales 
between the Empire and the French Monarchy, 



168 'A Short History of England 

and made the modern balance of power in Eu- 
rope. He is often described under the dictum 
of Bgo et Rex Meus; but he marks a stage 
in the English story rather because he suffered 
for it than because he said it. Ego et Rex Mens 
might be the motto of any modern Prime Min- 
ister; for we have forgotten the very fact that 
the word minister merely means servant. Wol- 
sey was the last great servant who could be, 
and was, simply dismissed; the mark of a 
monarchy still absolute; the English were 
amazed at it in modern Germany, when Bis- 
marck was turned away like a butler. A more 
awful act proved the new force was already 
inhuman ; it struck down the noblest of the 
Humanists. Thomas More, who seemed some- 
times like an Epicurean under Augustus, died 
the death of a saint under Diocletian. He died 
gloriously jesting; and the death has naturally 
drawn out for us rather the sacred savours of 
his soul; his tenderness and his trust in the 
truth of God. But for Humanism it must have 
seemed a monstrous sacrifice; it was somehow 
as if Montaigne were a martyr. And that is 
indeed the note; something truly to be called 
unnatural had already entered the naturalism 
of the Renascence; and the soul of the great 
Christian rose against it. He pointed to the 
sun, saying ''I shall be above that fellow" with 



The Rebellion of the Rich 169 

Franciscan familiarity, which can love nature 
because it will not worship her. So he left to 
his king the sun, which for so many weary 
days and years was to go down only on his 
wrath. 

But the more impersonal process which More 
himself had observed (as noted at the begin- 
ning of this chapter) is more clearly defined, 
and less clouded with controversies, in the sec- 
ond of the two parts of Henry's policy. There 
is indeed a controversy about the monasteries ; 
but it is one that is clarifying and settling every 
day. Now, it is true that the Church, by the 
Renascence period, had reached a considerable 
corruption; but the real proofs of it are utterly 
different both from the contemporary despotic 
pretence and from the common Protestant 
story. It is wildly unfair, for instance, to 
quote the letters of bishops and such authori- 
ties denouncing the sins of monastic life, vio- 
lent as they often are. They cannot possibly 
be more violent than the letters of St. Paul to 
the purest and most primitive churches; the 
apostle was there writing to those Early Chris- 
tians whom all churches idealise; and he talks 
to them as to cut-throats and thieves. The ex- 
planation, for those concerned for such subtle- 
ties, may possibly be found in the fact that 
Christianity is not a creed for good men, but 



-^ 



170 A Short History of England 

for men. Such letters had been written in all 
centuries; and even in the sixteenth century 
they do not prove so much that there were bad 
abbots as that there were good bishops. More- 
over, even those who profess that the monks 
were profligates dare not profess that they 
were oppressors; there is truth in Cobbett's 
point that where monks were landlords, they 
did not become rack-renting landlords, and 
could not become absentee landlords. Never- 
theless, there was a weakness in the good insti- 
tutions as well as a mere strength in the bad 
ones; and that weakness partakes of the worst 
element of the time. In the fall of good things 
there is almost always a touch of betrayal from 
within; and the abbots were destroyed more 
easily because they did not stand together. 
They did not stand together because the spirit 
of the age (which is very often the worst 
enemy of the age) was the increasing division 
between rich and poor; and it had partly di- 
vided even the rich and poor clergy. And the 
betrayal came, as it nearly always comes, from 
that servant of Christ who holds the bag. 

To take a modern attack on liberty, on a 
much lower plane, we are familiar with the 
picture of a politician going to the great brew- 
ers, or even the great hotel proprietors, and 
pointing out the uselessness of a litter of little 



The Rebellion of the Rich 171 

public-houses. That is what the Tudor poli- 
ticians did first with the monasteries. They 
went to the heads of the great houses and pro- 
posed the extinction of the small ones. The 
great monastic lords did not resist, or, at any 
rate, did not resist enough; and the sack of 
the religious houses began. But if the lord 
abbots acted for a moment as lords, that could 
not excuse them, in the eyes of much greater 
lords, for having frequently acted as abbots. 
A momentary rally to the cause of the rich 
did not wipe out the disgrace of a thousand 
petty interferences which had told only to the 
advantage of the poor; and they were soon to 
learn that it was no epoch for their easy rule 
and their careless hospitality. The great 
houses, now isolated, were themselves brought 
down one by one; and the beggar, whom the 
monastery had served as a sort of sacred tav- 
ern, came to it at evening and found it a ruin. 
For a new and wide philosophy was in the 
world, which still rules our society. By this 
creed most of the mystical virtues of the old 
monks have simply been turned into great sins ; 
and the greatest of these is charity. 

But the populace which had risen under 
Richard II. was not yet disarmed. It was 
trained in the rude discipline of bow and bill, 
and organized into local groups of town and 



172 A Short History of England 

guild and manor. Over half the counties of 
England the people rose, and fought one final 
battle for the vision of the Middle Ages. The 
chief tool of the new tyranny, a dirty fellow 
named Thomas Cromwell, was specially sin- 
gled out as the tyrant, and he was indeed rap- 
idly turning all government into a nightmare. 
The popular movement was put down partly 
by force; and there is the new note of modern 
militarism in the fact that it was put down by 
cynical professional troops, actually brought 
in from foreign countries, who destroyed Eng- 
lish religion for hire. But, like the old popular 
rising, it was even more put down by fraud. 
Like the old rising, it was sufficiently trium- 
phant to force the government to a parley ; and 
the government had to resort to the simple ex- 
pedient of calming the people with promises, 
and then proceeding to break first the promises 
and then the people, after the fashion made 
familiar to us by the modern politicians in their 
attitude towards the great strikes. The revolt 
bore the name of the Pilgrimage of Grace, and 
its programme was practically the restoration 
of the old religion. In connection with the 
fancy about the fate of England if Tyler had 
triumphed, it proves, I think, one thing; that 
his triumph, while it might or might not have 
led to something that could be called a reform, 



The Rebellion of the Rich 173 

would have rendered quite impossible every- 
thing that we now know as the Reformation. 

The reign of terror established by Thomas 
Cromwell became an Inquisition of the black- 
est and most unbearable sort. Historians, who 
have no shadow of sympathy with the old re- 
ligion, are agreed that it was viprooted by 
means more horrible than have ever, perhaps, 
been employed in England before or since. It 
was a government by torturers rendered ubi- 
quitous by spies. The spoliation of the monas- 
teries especially was carried out, not only with 
a violence which recalled barbarism, but with 
a minuteness for which there is no other word 
but meanness. It was as if the Dane had re- 
turned in the character of a detective. The 
inconsistency of the King's personal attitude 
to Catholicism did indeed complicate the con- 
spiracy with new brutalities towards Protest- 
ants; but such reaction as there was in this 
was wholly theological. Cromwell lost that 
fitful favour and was executed, but the terror- 
ism went on the more terribly for being sim- 
plified to the single vision of the wrath of the 
King. It culminated in a strange act which 
rounds ofT symbolically the story told on an 
earlier page. For the despot revenged him- 
self on a rebel whose defiance seemed to him 
to ring down three centuries. He laid waste 



174 A Short History of England 

the most popular shrine of the English, the 
shrine to which Chaucer had once ridden sing- 
ing, because it was also the shrine where King 
Henry had knelt to repent. For three cen- 
turies the Church and the people had called 
Becket a saint, when Henry Tudor arose and 
called him a traitor. This might well be 
thought the topmost point of autocracy, and 
yet it was not really so. 

For then rose to its supreme height of self- 
revelation that still stranger something of 
which we have, perhaps fancifully, found 
hints before in this history. The strong king 
was weak. He was immeasurably weaker 
than the strong kings of the Middle Ages; 
and whether or no his failure had been fore- 
shadowed, he failed. The breach he had made 
in the dyke of the ancient doctrines let in a 
flood that may almost be said to have washed 
him away. In a sense he disappeared before 
he died; for the drama that filled his last days 
is no longer the drama of his own character. 
We may put the matter most practically by 
saying that it is unpractical to discuss whether 
Froude finds any justification for Henry's 
crimes in the desire to create a strong national 
monarchy. For whether or no it was desired, 
it was not created. Least of all our princes 
did the Tudors leave behind them a secure 



The Rebellion of the Rich 175 

central government, and the time when mon- 
archy was at its worst comes only one or two 
generations before the time when it was weak- 
est. But a few years afterwards, as history 
goes, the relations of the Crown and its new 
servants were to be reversed on a high stage 
so as to horrify the world, and the axe which 
had been sanctified with the blood of More 
and soiled with the blood of Cromwell was, 
at the signal of one of that slave's own de- 
scendants, to fall and to kill an English king. ^^ ^^ 

The tide which thus burst through the ^ ^ 
breach and overwhelmed the King as well as 
the Church was the revolt of the rich, and es- 
pecially of the new rich. They used the 
King's name, and could not have prevailed 
without his power, but the ultimate effect was 
rather as if they had plundered the King after 
he had plundered the monasteries. Amazingly 
little of the wealth, considering the name and 
theory of the thing, actually remained in royal 
hands. The chaos was increased, no doubt, 
by the fact that Edward VI. succeeded to the 
throne as a mere boy, but the deeper truth 
can be seen in the difficulty of drawing any 
real line between the two reigns. By marry- 
ing into the Seymour family, and thus pro- 
viding himself with a son, Henry had also pro- 
vided the country with the very type of pow- 



176 A Short History of England 

erful family which was to rule merely by 
pillage. An enormous and unnatural tragedy, 
the execution of one of the Seymours by his 
own brother, was enacted during the impo- 
tence of the childish king, and the successful 
Seymour figured as Lord Protector, though 
even he would have found it hard to say what 
he was protecting, since it was not even his 
own family. Anyhow, it is hardly too much to 
say that every human thing was left unpro- 
tected from the greed of such cannibal pro- 
tectors. We talk of the dissolution of the 
monasteries, but what occurred was the dis- 
solution of the whole of the old civilization. 
Lawyers and lackeys and money-lenders, the 
meanest of lucky men, looted the art and eco- 
nomics of the Middle Ages like thieves rob- 
bing a church. Their names (when they did 
not change them) became the names of the 
great dukes and marquises of our own day. 
But if we look back and forth in our history, 
perhaps the most fundamental act of destruc- 
tion occurred when the armed men of the Sey- 
mours and their sort passed from the sack- 
ing of the Monasteries to the sacking of the 
Guilds. The mediaeval Trade Unions were 
struck down, their buildings broken into by the 
soldiery, and their funds seized by the new 
nobility. And this simple incident takes all its 



The Rebellion of the Rich 177 

common meaning out of the assertion (in itself 
plausible enough) that the guilds, like every- 
thing else at that time, were probably not at 
their best. Proportion is the only practical 
thing; and it may be true that Caesar was not 
feeling well on the morning of the Ides of 
March. But simply to say that the Guilds de- 
clined, is about as true as saying that Csesar 
quietly decayed from purely natural causes at 
the foot of the statue of Pompey. 



XII — Spain and the Schism of Nations 



THE revolution that arose out of what 
is called the Renascence, and ended 
in some countries in what is called 
the Reformation, did in the internal 
politics of England one drastic and definite 
thing. That thing was destroying the institu- 
tions of the poor. It was not the only thing 
it did, but it was much the most practical. It 
was the basis of all the problems now con- 
nected with Capital and Labour. How much 
the theological theories of the time had to do 
with it is a perfectly fair matter for difference 
of opinion. But neither party, if educated 
about the facts, will deny that the same time 
and temper which produced the religious 
schism also produced this new lawlessness in 
the rich. The most extreme Protestant will 
probably be content to say that Protestantism 
was not the motive, but the mask. The most 
extreme Catholic will probably be content to 
admit that Protestantism was not the sin, but 
rather the punishment. The most sweeping 
and shameless part of the process was not com- 
plete, indeed, until the end of the eighteenth 

178 



Spain and the Schism of Nations 179 

century, when Protestantism was already pass- 
ing into scepticism. Indeed a very decent case 
could be made out for the paradox that Puri- 
tanism was first and last a veneer on Pagan- 
ism; that the thing began in the inordinate 
thirst for new things in the noblesse of the 
Renascence and ended in the Hell-Fire Club. 
Anyhow, what was first founded at the Refor- 
mation was a new and abnormally powerful 
aristocracy, and what was destroyed, in an 
ever-increasing degree, was everything that 
could be held, directly or indirectly, by the peo- 
ple in spite of such an aristocracy. This fact 
has filled all the subsequent history of our 
country; but the next particular point in that 
history concerns the position of the Crown. 
The King, in reality, had already been elbowed 
aside by the courtiers who had crowded behind 
him just before the bursting of the door. The 
King is left behind in the rush for wealth, and 
already can do nothing alone. And of this 
fact the next reign, after the chaos of Edward 
VI.'s affords a very arresting proof. 

Mary Tudor, daughter of the divorced 
Queen Katherine, has a bad name even in pop- 
ular history ; and popular prejudice is generally 
more worthy of study than scholarly sophistry. 
Her enemies were indeed largely wrong about 
her character, but they were not wrong about 



180 A Short History of England 

her effect. She was, in the limited sense, a 
good woman, convinced, conscientious, rather 
morbid. But it is true that she was a bad 
queen ; bad for many things, but especially bad 
for her own most beloved cause. It is true, 
when all is said, that she set herself to burn 
out *'No Popery" and managed to burn it in. 
The concentration of her fanaticism into cruel- 
ty, especially its concentration in particular 
places and in a short time, did remain like 
something red-hot in the public memory. It 
was the first of the series of great historical 
accidents that separated a real, if not univer- 
sal, public opinion from the old regime. It has 
been summarised in the death by fire of the 
three famous martyrs at Oxford; for one of 
them at least, Latimer, was a reformer of the 
more robust and human type, though another 
of them, Cranmer, had been so smooth a snob 
and coward in the councils of Henry VIII. as 
to make Thomas Cromwell seem by compari- 
son a man. But of what may be called the 
Latimer tradition, the saner and more genuine 
Protestantism, I shall speak later. At the time 
even the Oxford Martyrs probably produced 
less pity and revulsion than the massacre in 
the flames of many more obscure enthusiasts, 
whose very ignorance and poverty made their 
cause seem more popular than it really was. 



Spain and the Schism of Nations 181 

But this last ugly feature was brought into 
sharper relief, and produced more conscious or 
unconscious bitterness, because of that other 
great fact of which I spoke above, which is the 
determining test of this time of transition. 

What made all the difference was this : that 
even in this Catholic reign the property of the 
Catholic Church could not be restored. The 
very fact that Mary was a fanatic, and yet 
this act of justice was beyond the wildest 
dreams of fanaticism — that is the point. The 
very fact that she was angry enough to com- 
mit wrongs for the Church, and yet not bold 
enough to ask for the rights of the Church — 
that is the test of the time. She was allowed 
to deprive small men of their lives, she was 
not allowed to deprive great men of their prop- 
erty — or rather of other people's property. 
She could punish heresy, she could not punish 
sacrilege. She was forced into the false posi- 
tion of killing men who had not gone to church, 
and sparing men who had gone there to 
steal the church ornaments. What forced her 
into it? Not certainly her own religious atti- 
tude, which was almost maniacally sincere ; not 
public opinion, which had naturally much more 
sympathy for the religious humanities which 
she did not restore than for the religious in- 
humanities which she did. The force came, 



182 A Short History of England 

of course, from the new nobility and the new 
wealth they refused to surrender ; and the suc- 
cess of this early pressure proves that the no- 
bility was already stronger than the Crown. 
The sceptre had only been used as a crowbar 
to break open the door of a treasure-house, and 
was itself broken, or at least bent, with the 
blow. 

There is a truth also in the popular insist- 
ence on the story of Mary having ^'Calais" 
written on her heart, when the last relic of 
the mediaeval conquests reverted to France. 
Mary had the solitary and heroic half-virtue 
of the Tudors : she was a patriot. But patriots 
are often pathetically behind the times ; for the 
very fact that they dwell on old enemies often 
blinds them to new ones. In a later generation 
Cromwell exhibited the same error reversed, 
and continued to keep a hostile eye on Spain 
when he should have kept it on France. In 
our own time the Jingoes of Fashoda kept it 
on France when they ought already to have 
had it on Germany. With no particular anti- 
national intention, Mary nevertheless got her- 
self into an anti-national position towards the 
most tremendous international problem of her 
people. It is the second of the coincidences 
that confirmed the sixteenth-century change, 
and the name of it was Spain. The daughter 



Spain amd the Schism of Nations 183 

of a Spanish queen, she married a Spanish 
prince, and probably saw no more in such an 
alliance than her father had done. But by 
the time she was succeeded by her sister Eliza- 
beth, who was more cut off from the old re- 
ligion (though very tenuously attached to the 
new one), and by the time the project of a 
similar Spanish marriage for Elizabeth herself 
had fallen through, something had matured 
which was wider and mightier than the plots 
of princes. The Englishman, standing on his 
little island as on a lonely boat, had already 
felt falling across him the shadow of a tall 
ship. 

Wooden cliches about the birth of the Brit- 
ish Empire and the spacious days of Queen 
Elizabeth have not merely obscured but con- 
tradicted the crucial truth. From such phrases 
one would fancy that England, in some impe- 
rial fashion, now first realised that she was 
great. It would be far truer to say that she 
now first realised that she was small. The 
great poet of the spacious days does not praise 
her as spacious, but only as small, like a jewel. 
The vision of universal expansion was wholly 
veiled until the eighteenth century; and even 
when it came it was far less vivid and vital 
than what came in the sixteenth. What came 
then was not Imperialism; it was Anti-Impe- 



184} A Short History of England 

rialism. England achieved, at the beginning 
of her modern history, that one thing human 
imagination will always find heroic — the story 
of a small nationality. The business of the 
Armada was to her what Bannockburn was to 
the Scots, or Majuba to the Boers — a victory 
that astonished even the victors. What was 
opposed to them was Imperialism in its com- 
plete and colossal sense, a thing unthinkable 
since Rome. It was, in no overstrained sense, 
civilisation itself. It was the greatness of 
Spain that was the glory of England. It is 
only when we realise that the English were, by 
comparison, as dingy, as undeveloped, as petty 
and provincial as Boers, that we can appre- 
ciate the height of their defiance or the splen- 
dour of their escape. We can only grasp it 
by grasping that for a great part of Europe 
the cause of the Armada had almost the cos- 
mopolitan common sense of a crusade. The 
Pope had declared Elizabeth illegitimate — log- 
ically, it is hard to see what else he could say, 
having declared her mother's marriage in- 
valid; but the fact was another and perhaps a 
final stroke sundering England from the elder 
world. Meanwhile those picturesque English 
privateers who had plagued the Spanish Em- 
pire of the New World were spoken of in the 
South simply as pirates, and technically the 



Spain and the Schism of Nations 185 

description was true ; only technical assaults by 
the weaker party are in retrospect rightly 
judged with some generous weakness. Then, 
as if to stamp the contrast in an imperishable 
image, Spain, or rather the empire with Spain 
for its centre, put forth all its strength, and 
seemed to cover the sea with a navy like the 
legendary navy of Xerxes. It bore down on 
the doomed island with the weight and solem- 
nity of a day of judgment; sailors or pirates 
struck at it with small ships staggering under 
large cannon, fought it with mere masses of 
flaming rubbish, and in that last hour of grap- 
ple a great storm arose out of the sea and 
swept round the island, and the gigantic fleet 
was seen no more. The uncanny completeness 
and abrupt silence that swallowed this prodigy 
touched a nerve that has never ceased to vi- 
brate. The hope of England dates from that 
hopeless hour, for there is no real hope that 
has not once been a forlorn hope. The break- 
ing of that vast naval net remained like a sign 
that the small thing which escaped would sur- 
vive the greatness. And yet there is truly a 
sense in which we may never be so small or so 
great again. 

For the splendour of the Elizabethan age, 
which is always spoken of as a sunrise, was in 
many ways a sunset. Whether we regard it 



186 A Short History of England 

as the end of the Renascence or the end of 
the old mediaeval civilisation, no candid critic 
can deny that its chief glories ended with it. 
Let the reader ask himself what strikes him 
specially in the Elizabethan magnificence, and 
he will generally find it is something of which 
there were at least traces in mediaeval times, 
and far fewer traces in modern times. The 
Elizabethan drama is like one of its own trage- 
dies — its tempestuous torch was soon to be 
trodden out by the Puritans. It is needless to 
say that the chief tragedy was the cutting 
short of the comedy; for the comedy that came 
to England after the Restoration was by com- 
parison both foreign and frigid. At the best 
it is comedy in the sense of being humorous, 
but not in the sense of being happy. It may be 
noted that the givers of good news and good 
luck in the Shakesperian love-stories nearly all 
belong to a world which was passing, whether 
they are friars or fairies. It is the same with 
the chief Elizabethan ideals, often embodied in 
the Elizabethan drama. The national devo- 
tion to the Virgin Queen must not be wholly 
discredited by its incongruity with the coarse 
and crafty character of the historical Eliza- 
beth. Her critics might indeed reasonably say 
that in replacing the Virgin Mary by the Vir- 
gin Queen, the English reformers merely ex- 



Spain mid the Schism of Nations 187 

changed a true virgin for a false one. But 
this truth does not dispose of a true, though 
Hmited, contemporary cult. Whatever we 
think of that particular Virgin Queen, the 
tragic heroines of the time offer us a whole 
procession of virgin queens. And it is certain 
that the medisevals would have understood 
much better than the moderns the martyrdom 
of Measure for Measure. And as with the 
title of Virgin, so with the title of Queen. The 
mystical monarchy glorified in Richard 11. 
was soon to be dethroned much more ruin- 
ously than in Richard II, The same Puritans 
who tore off the pasteboard crowns of the 
stage players were also to tear off the real 
crowns of the kings whose parts they played. 
All mummery was to be forbidden, and all 
monarchy to be called mummery. 

Shakespeare died upon St. George's Day, 
and much of what St. George had meant died 
with him. I do not mean that the patriotism 
of Shakespeare or of England died; that re- 
mained and even rose steadily, to be the noblest 
pride of the coming times. But much more 
than patriotism had been involved in that 
image of St. George to whom the Lion Heart 
had dedicated England long ago in the deserts 
of Palestine. The conception of a patron 
saint had carried from the Middle Ages one 



188 'A Short History of England 

very unique and as yet unreplaced idea. It 
was the idea of variation without antagonism. 
The Seven Champions of Christendom were 
multiplied by seventy times seven in the pa- 
trons of towns, trades and social types; but the 
very idea that they were all saints excluded 
the possibility of ultimate rivalry in the fact 
that they were all patrons. The Guild of the 
Shoemakers and the Guild of the Skinners, 
carrying the badges of St. Crispin and St. Bar- 
tholomew, might fight each other in the 
streets ; but they did not believe that St. Crispin 
and St. Bartholomew were fighting each other 
in the skies. Similarly the English would cry 
in battle on St. George and the French on St. 
Denis; but they did not seriously believe that 
St. George hated St. Denis or even those who 
cried upon St. Denis. Joan of Arc, who was 
on the point of patriotism what many modern 
people would call very fanatical, was yet upon 
this point what most modern people would call 
very enlightened. Now, with the religious 
schism, it cannot be denied, a deeper and more 
inhuman division appeared. It was no longer 
a scrap between the followers of saints who 
were themselves at peace, but a war between 
the followers of gods who were themselves at 
war. That the great Spanish ships were 
named after St. Francis or St. Philip was al- 



Spain and the Schism of Nations 189 

ready beginning to mean little to the new Eng- 
land; soon it was to mean something almost 
cosmically conflicting, as if they were named 
after Baal or Thor. These are indeed mere 
symbols; but the process of which they are 
symbols was very practical and must be seri- 
ously followed. There entered with the re- 
ligious wars the idea which modern science ap- 
plies to racial wars; the idea of natural wars 
not arising from a special quarrel but from 
the nature of the people quarrelling. The 
shadow of racial fatalism first fell across our 
path, and far away in distance and darkness 
something moved that men had almost for- 
gotten. 

Beyond the frontiers of the fading Empire 
lay that outer land, as loose and drifting as a 
sea, which had boiled over in the barbarian 
wars. Most of it was now formally Christian, 
but barely civilised; a faint awe of the culture 
of the south and west lay on its wild forces 
like a light frost. This semi-civilised world 
had long been asleep; but it had begun to 
dream. In the generation before Elizabeth a 
great man who, with all his violence, was vi- 
tally a dreamer, Martin Luther, had cried out 
in his sleep in a voice like thunder, partly 
against the place of bad customs, but largely 
also against the place of good works in the 



190 14 Short History of England 

Christian scheme. In the generation after 
Elizabeth the spread of the new wild doctrines 
in the old wild lands had sucked Central Eu- 
rope into a cyclic war of creeds. In this the 
house which stood for the legend of the Holy 
Roman Empire, Austria, the Germanic partner 
of Spain, fought for the old religion against a 
league of other Germans fighting for the new. 
The continental conditions were indeed com- 
plicated, and grew more and more com- 
plicated as the dream of restoring religious 
unity receded. They were complicated by the 
firm determination of France to be a nation in 
the full modern sense ; to stand free and four- 
square from all combinations ; a purpose which 
led her, while hating her own Protestants at 
home, to give diplomatic support to many Prot- 
estants abroad, simply because it preserved the 
balance of power against the gigantic confed- 
eration of Spaniards and Austrians. It is 
complicated by the rise of a Calvinistic and 
commercial power in the Netherlands, logical, 
defiant, defending its own independence val- 
iantly against Spain. But on the whole we 
shall be right if we see the first throes of the 
modern international problems in what is 
called the Thirty Years' War ; whether we call 
it the revolt of half-heathens against the Holy 
Roman Empire, or whether we call it the com- 



Spain and the Schisrn of Nations 191 

ing of new sciences, new philosophies, and 
new ethics from the north. Sweden took a 
hand in the struggle, and sent a military hero 
to the help of the newer Germany; but the 
sort of military heroism everywhere exhibited 
offered a strange combination of more and 
more complex strategic science with the most 
naked and cannibal cruelty. Other forces be- 
sides Sweden found a career in the carnage. 
Far away to the north-east, in a sterile land 
of fens, a small ambitious family of money- 
lenders, who had become squires, vigilant, 
thrifty, thoroughly selfish, rather thinly adopt- 
ed the theories of Luther, and began to lend 
their almost savage hinds as soldiers on the 
Protestant side. They were well paid for it 
by step after step of promotion; but at this 
time their principality was only the old Mark 
of Brandenburg. Their own name was 
HohenzoUern. 



XIII — The Age of the Puritans 



w 



E should be very much bored if 
we had to read an account of 
the most exciting argument or 
string of adventures in which 
unmeaning words such as "snark" or "boo- 
jum" were systematically substituted for the 
names of the chief characters or objects in 
dispute ; if we were told that a king was given 
the alternative of becoming a snark or finally 
surrendering the boojum, or that a mob was 
roused to fury by the public exhibition of a 
boojum which was inevitably regarded as a 
gross reflection on the snark. Yet something 
very like this situation is created by most mod- 
ern attempts to tell the tale of the theological 
troubles of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- 
turies, while deferring to the fashionable dis- 
taste for theology in this generation — or 
rather in the last generation. Thus the Puri- 
tans, as their name implies, were primarily en- 
thusiastic for what they thought was pure re- 
ligion ; frequently they wanted to impose it on 
others ; sometimes they only wanted to be free 
to practise it themselves, but in no case can 

192 



The Age of the Puritans 193 

justice be done to what was finest in their char- 
acters, as well as first in their thoughts, if 
we never by any chance ask what "it" was that 
they wanted to impose or to practise. Now^ 
there was a great deal that was very fine about 
many of the Puritans, which is almost entirely 
missed by the modern admirers of the Puri- 
tans. They are praised for things which they 
either regarded with indifference or more often 
detested with frenzy — such as religious liberty. 
And yet they are quite insufficiently under- 
stood, and are even undervalued, in their log- 
ical case for the things they really did care 
about — such as Calvinism. We make the 
Puritans picturesque in a way they would vio- 
lently repudiate, in novels and plays they would 
have publicly burnt. We are interested in 
everything about them except the only thing 
in which they were interested at all. 

We have seen that in the first instance the 
new doctrines in England were simply an ex- 
cuse for a plutocratic pillage, and thaf is the 
only truth to be told about the matter. But it 
was far otherwise with the individuals a gen- 
eration or two after, to whom the wreck of 
the Armada was already a legend of national 
deliverance from Popery, as miraculous and 
almost as remote as the deliverances of which 
they read so realistically in the Hebrew Books 



194 A Short History of England 

now laid open to them. The august accident 
of that Spanish defeat may perhaps have coin- 
cided only too well with their concentration on 
the non-Christian parts of Scripture. It may 
have satisfied a certain Old Testament senti- 
ment of the election of the English being an- 
nounced in the stormy oracles of air and sea, 
which was easily turned into that heresy of a 
tribal pride that took even heavier hold upon 
the Germans. It is by such things that a civi- 
lised state may fall from being a Christian na- 
tion to being a Chosen People. But even if 
their nationalism was of a kind that has ulti- 
mately proved perilous to the comity of na- 
tions, it still was nationalism. From first to 
last the Puritans were patriots, a point in 
which they had a marked superiority over the 
French Huguenots. Politically, they were in- 
deed at first but one wing of the new wealthy 
class which had despoiled the Church and 
were proceeding to despoil the Crown. But 
while they were all merely creatures of the 
great spoliation, many of them were the uncon- 
scious creatures of it. They were strongly 
represented in the aristocracy, but a great 
number were of the middle classes, though al- 
most wholly the middle classes of the towns. 
By the poor agricultural population, which was 
still by far the largest part of the population, 



The Age of the Puritmis 195 

they were simply derided and detested. It may 
be noted, for instance, that, while they led the 
nation in many of its higher departments, they 
could produce nothing having the atmosphere 
of what is rather priggishly called folklore. 
All the popular tradition there is, as in songs, 
toasts, rhymes, or proverbs, is all Royalist. 
About the Puritans we can find no great leg- 
end. We must put up as best we can with 
great literature. 

All these things, however, are simply things 
that other people might have noticed about 
them; they are not the most important things, 
and certainly not the things they thought about 
themselves. The soul of the movement was in 
two conceptions, or rather in two steps, the 
first being the moral process by which they 
arrived at their chief conclusion, and the sec- 
ond the chief conclusion they arrived at. We 
will begin with the first, especially as it was 
this which determined all that external social 
attitude which struck the eye of contempora- 
ries. The honest Puritan, growing up in youth 
in a world swept bare by the great pillage, pos- 
sessed himself of a first principle which is one 
of the three or four alternative first principles 
which are possible to the mind of man. It 
was the principle that the mind of man can 
alone directly deal with the mind of God. It 



196 A Short History of England 

may shortly be called the anti-sacramental 
principle; but it really applies, and he really 
applied it, to many things besides the sacra- 
ments of the Church. It equally applies, and 
he equally applied it, to art, to letters, to the 
love of locality, to music, and even to good 
manners. The phrase about no priest coming 
between a man and his Creator is but an im- 
poverished fragment of the full philosophic 
doctrine; the true Puritan was equally clear 
that no singer or story-teller or fiddler must 
translate the voice of God to him into the 
tongues of terrestrial beauty. It is notable 
that the one Puritan man of genius in modern 
times, Tolstoy, did accept this full conclusion; 
denounced all music as a mere drug, and for- 
bade his own admirers to read his own admir- 
able novels. Now, the English Puritans were 
not only Puritans but Englishmen, and there- 
fore did not always shine in clearness of head ; 
as we shall see, true Puritanism was rather a 
Scotch than an English thing. But this was 
the driving power and the direction; and the 
doctrine is quite tenable if a trifle insane. In- 
tellectual truth was the only tribute fit for the 
highest truth of the universe; and the next 
step in such a study is to observe what the 
Puritan thought was the truth about that 
truth. His individual reason, cut loose from 



The Age of the Puritans 197 

instinct as well as tradition, taught him a con- 
cept of the omnipotence of God which meant 
simply the impotence of man. In Luther, the 
earlier and milder form of the Protestant proc- 
ess only went so far as to say that nothing 
a man did could help him except his confes- 
sion of Christ; with Calvin it took the last 
logical step and said that even this could not 
help him, since omnipotence must have dis- 
posed of all his destiny beforehand; that men 
must be created to be lost and saved. In the 
purer types of whom I speak this logic was 
white-hot, and we must read the formula into 
all their parliamentary and legal formulae. 
When we read, "The Puritan party demanded 
reforms in the Church," w^e must understand, 
*'The Puritan party demanded fuller and 
clearer affirmation that men are created to 
be lost and saved.'' When we read, "The 
Army selected persons for their godliness," 
we must understand, "The Army selected 
those persons who seemed most convinced that 
men are created to be lost and saved." It 
should be added that this terrible trend was 
not confined even to Protestant countries; 
some great Romanists doubtfully followed it 
until stopped by Rome. It was the spirit of 
the age, and should be a permanent warning 
against mistaking the spirit of the age for the 



198 A Short History of England 



immortal spirit of man. For there are now 
few Christians or non-Christians who can look 
back at the Calvinism which nearly captured 
Canterbury and even Rome by the genius and 
heroism of Pascal or Milton, without crying 
out, like the lady in Mr. Bernard Shaw's play, 
"How splendid! How glorious! . . . and oh 
what an escape !" 

The next thing to note is that their concep- 
tion of Church-government was in a true sense 
self-government; and yet, for a particular rea- 
son, turned out to be a rather selfish self-gov- 
ernment. It was equal, and yet it was exclu- 
sive. Internally the synod or conventicle 
tended to be a small republic, but unfortu- 
nately to be a very small republic. In rela- 
tion to the street outside the conventicle was 
not a republic but an aristocracy. It was the 
most awful of all aristocracies, that of the 
elect ; for it was not a right of birth but a right 
before birth, and alone of all nobilities it was 
not laid level in the dust. Hence we have, on 
the one hand, in the simpler Puritans a ring of 
real republican virtue; a defiance of tyrants, 
an assertion of human dignity, but above all 
an appeal to that first of all republican virtues 
— publicity. One of the Regicides, on trial 
for his life, struck the note which all the un- 
naturalness of his school cannot deprive of no- 



The Age of the Puritans 199 

bility: ^'Thls thing was not done in a cor- 
ner." But their most drastic idealism did 
nothing to recover a ray of the Hght that at 
once Hghtened every man that came into the 
world, the assumption of a brotherhood in all 
baptised people. They were, indeed, very like 
that dreadful scaffold at which the Regicide 
was not afraid to point. They were certainly 
public, they may have been public-spirited, 
they were never popular; and it seems never 
to have crossed their minds that there was any 
need to be popular. England was never so lit- 
tle of a democracy as during the short time 
when she was a republic. 

The struggle with the Stuarts, w^hich is the 
next passage in our history, arose from an 
alliance, which some may think an accidental 
alliance, between two things. The first was 
this intellectual fashion of Calvinism which 
affected the cultured world as did our recent 
intellectual fashion of Collectivism. The sec- 
ond was the older thing which had made that 
creed and perhaps that cultured world possi- 
ble — the aristocratic revolt under the last Tu- 
dors. It was, we might say, the story of a 
father and a son dragging down the same 
golden image, but the younger really from 
hatred of idolatry, and the older solely from 
love of gold. It is at once the tragedy and 



200 A Short History of England 

the paradox of England that it was the eternal 
passion that passed, and the transient or ter- 
restrial passion that remained. This was true 
of England; it was far less true of Scotland; 
and that is the meaning of the Scotch and 
English war that ended at Worcester. The 
first change had indeed been much the same 
materialist matter in both countries — a mere 
brigandage of barons; and even John Knox, 
though he has become a national hero, was an 
extremely anti-national politician. The pa- 
triot party in Scotland was that of Cardinal 
Beaton and Mary Stuart. Nevertheless, the 
new creed did become popular in the Lowlands 
in a positive sense, not even yet known in our 
own land. Hence in Scotland Puritanism was 
the main thing, and was mixed with Parlia- 
mentary and other oligarchies. In England 
Parliamentary oligarchy was the main thing, 
and was mixed with Puritanism. When the 
storm began to rise against Charles I., after 
the more or less transitional time of his father, 
the Scotch successor of Elizabeth, the in- 
stances commonly cited mark all the difference 
between democratic religion and aristocratic 
politics. The Scotch legend is that of Jenny 
Geddes, the old woman who threw a stool at 
the priest. The English legend is that of John 
Hampden, the great squire who raised a 



The Age of the Puritans 201 

county against the King. The Parliamentary 
movement in England was, indeed, almost 
wholly a thing of squires, with their new allies 
the merchants. They were squires who may 
well have regarded themselves as the real and 
natural leaders of the English; but they were 
leaders who allowed no mutiny among their 
followers. There was certainly no Village 
Hampden in Hampden Village. 

The Stuarts, it may be suspected, brought 
from Scotland a more mediaeval and therefore 
more logical view of their own function; for 
the note of their nation was logic. It is a 
proverb that James I. was a Scot and a ped- 
ant; it is hardly sufficiently noted that Charles 
I. also was not a little of a pedant, being very 
much of a Scot. He had also the virtues of 
a Scot, courage, and a quite natural dignity, 
and an appetite for the things of the mind. 
Being somewhat Scottish, he was very un- 
English, and could not manage a compromise : 
he tried instead to split hairs, and seemed 
merely to break promises. Yet he might 
safely have been far more inconsistent if he 
had been a little hearty and hazy; but he was 
of the sort that sees everything in black and 
white; and it is therefore remembered — espe- 
cially the black. From the first he fenced with 
his Parliament as with a mere foe; perhaps 



202 A Short History of England 

he almost felt it as a foreigner. The issue is 
familiar, and we need not be so careful as the 
gentleman who wished to finish the chapter in 
order to find out what happened to Charles I. 
His minister, the great Strafford, was foiled 
in an attempt to make him strong in the fash- 
ion of a French king, and perished on the 
scaffold, a frustrated Richelieu. The Parlia- 
ment claiming the power of the purse, Charles 
appealed to the power of the sword, and at 
first carried all before him; but success passed 
to the wealth of the Parliamentary class, the 
discipline of the new army, and the patience 
and genius of Cromwell; and Charles died the 
same death as his great servant. 

Historically, the quarrel resolved itself, 
through ramifications generally followed per- 
haps in more detail than they deserve, into the 
great modern query of whether a King can 
raise taxes without the consent of his Parlia- 
ment. The test case was that of Hampden, 
the great Buckinghamshire magnate, who 
challenged the legality of a tax which Charles 
imposed for the equipment of the national 
navy. As even innovators always of neces- 
sity seek for sanctity in the past, the Puritan 
squires made a legend of the mediaeval Magna 
Charta ; and they were so far in a true tradition 
that the concession of John had really been. 



The Age of the Puritans 203 



as we have already noted, anti-despotic with- 
out being democratic. These two truths cover 
two parts of the problem of the Stuart fall, 
which are of very different certainty, and 
should be considered separately. 

For the first point about democracy, no can- 
did person, in face of the facts, can really con- 
sider it at all. It is quite possible to hold that 
the seventeenth-century Parliament was fight- 
ing for the truth ; it is not possible to hold that 
it was fighting for the populace. After the 
autumn of the Middle Ages Parliament was 
always actively aristocratic and actively anti- 
popular. The institution which forbade 
Charles I. to raise Ship Money was the same 
institution which previously forbade Richard 
II. to free the serfs. The assembly which 
claimed coal and minerals from Charles I. was 
the same which afterward claimed the common 
lands from the village communities. It was 
the same institution which only two genera- 
tions before had eagerly helped to destroy, not 
merely things of popular sentiment like the 
monasteries, but all the things of popular util- 
ity like the guilds and parishes, the local gov- 
ernments of towns and trades. The work of 
the great lords may have had, indeed it cer- 
tainly had, another more patriotic and creative 
side; but it was exclusively the work of the 



204 A Short History of England 

great lords that was done by Parliament. The 
House of Commons has itself been a House of 
Lords. 

But when we turn to the other or anti-des- 
potic aspects of the campaign against the Stu- 
arts, we come to something much more difficult 
to dismiss and much more easy to justify. 
While the stupidest things are said against the 
Stuarts, the real contemporary case for their 
enemies is little realised; for it is connected 
with what our insular history most neglects, 
the condition of the Continent. It should be 
remembered that though the Stuarts failed in 
England they fought for things that succeeded 
in Europe. These were roughly, first, the ef- 
fects of the Counter-Reformation, which made 
the sincere Protestant see Stuart Catholicism 
not at all as the last flicker of an old flame, but 
as the spread of a conflagration. Charles IL, 
for instance, was a man of strong, sceptical, 
and almost irritably humorous intellect, and he 
was quite certainly, and even reluctantly, con- 
vinced of Catholicism as a philosophy. The 
other and more important matter here was the 
almost awful autocracy that was being built up 
in France like a Bastille. It was more logical, 
and in many ways more equal and even equi- 
table than the English oligarchy, but it really 
became a tyranny in case of rebellion or even 



The Age of the Puritans 205 

resistance. There were none of the rough 
EngHsh safeguards of juries and good customs 
of the old common law; there was lettre de 
cachet as unanswerable as magic. The Eng- 
lish who defied the law were better off than the 
French ; a French satirist would probably have 
retorted that it was the English who obeyed 
the law who were worse off than the French. 
The ordering of men's normal lives was with 
the squire; but he was, if anything, more lim- 
ited when he was the magistrate. He was 
stronger as master of the village, but actually 
weaker as agent of the King. In defending 
this state of things, in short, the Whigs were 
certainly not defending democracy, but they 
were in a real sense defending liberty. They 
were even defending some remains of mediaeval 
liberty, though not the best; the jury though 
not the guild. Even feudalism had involved a 
localism not without liberal elements, which lin- 
gered in the aristocratic system. Those who 
loved such things might well be alarmed at the 
Leviathan of the State, which for Hobbes was 
a single monster and for France a single man. 
As to the mere facts, it must be said again 
that in so far as Puritanism was pure, it was 
unfortunately passing. And the very type of 
the transition by which it passed can be found 
in that extraordinary man who is popularly 



206 A Short History of England 

credited with making it predominate. Oliver 
Cromwell is in history much less the leader of 
Puritanism than the tamer of Puritanism. He 
was undoubtedly possessed, certainly in his 
youth, possibly all his life, by the rather sombre 
religious passions of his period; but as he 
emerges into importance, he stands more and 
more for the Positivism of the English as com- 
pared with the Puritanism of the Scotch. He 
is one of the Puritan squires ; but he is steadily 
more of the squire and less of the Puritan; 
and he points to the process by which the 
squirearchy became at last merely pagan. This 
is the key to most of what is praised and most 
of what is blamed in him ; the key to the com- 
parative sanity, toleration and modern effi- 
ciency of many of his departures; the key to 
the comparative coarseness, earthiness, cyni- 
cism, and lack of sympathy in many others. 
He was the reverse of an idealist; and he can- 
not without absurdity be held up as an ideal; 
but he was, like most of the squires, a type 
genuinely English; not without public spirit, 
certainly not without patriotism. His seizure 
of personal power, which destroyed an imper- 
sonal and ideal government, had something 
English in its very unreason. The act of kill- 
ing the King, I fancy, was not primarily his, 
and certainly not characteristically his. It 



The Age of the Puritans 207 

was a concession to the high inhuman ideals 
of the tiny group of true Puritans, with 
whom he had to compromise but with whom 
he afterwards collided. It was logic rather 
than cruelty in the act that was not Crom- 
wellian; for he treated with bestial cruelty 
the native Irish, whom the new spiritual ex- 
clusiveness regarded as beasts — or as the mod- 
ern euphemism would put it, as aborigines. 
But his practical temper was more akin to such 
human slaughter on what seemed to him the 
edges of civilisation, than by a sort of human 
sacrifice in the very centre and forum of it; he 
is not a representative regicide. In a sense 
that piece of headsmanship was rather above 
his head. The real regicides did it in a sort of 
trance or vision ; and he was not troubled with 
visions. But the true collision between the re- 
ligious and rational sides of the seventeenth- 
century movement came symbolically on that 
day of driving storm at Dunbar, when the rav- 
ing Scotch preachers overruled Leslie and 
forced him down into the valley to be the victim 
of the Cromwellian common sense. Cromwell 
said that God had delivered them into his hand ; 
but it was their own God who delivered them, 
the dark unnatural God of the Calvinist 
dreams, as overpowering as a nightmare — and 
as passing. 



208 A Short History of England 

It was the Whig rather than the Puritan that 
triumphed on that day ; it was the EngHshman 
with his aristocratic compromise; and even 
what followed CromwelFs death, the Restora- 
tion, was an aristocratic compromise, and even 
a Whig compromise. The mob might cheer as 
for a mediaeval king; but the Protectorate and 
the Restoration were more of a piece than the 
mob understood. Even in the superficial 
things where there seemed to be a rescue it was 
ultimately a respite. Thus the Puritan regime 
had risen chiefly by one thing unknown to me- 
disevalism — militarism. Picked professional 
troops, harshly drilled but highly paid, were 
the new and alien instrument by which the 
Puritans became masters. These were dis- 
banded and their return resisted by Tories and 
Whigs; but their return seemed always im- 
minent, because it was in the spirit of the new 
stern world of the Thirty Years' War. A dis- 
covery is an incurable disease ; and it had been 
discovered that a crowd could be turned into an 
iron centipede, crushing larger and looser 
crowds. Similarly the remains of Christmas 
were rescued from the Puritans ; but they had 
eventually to be rescued again by Dickens from 
the Utilitarians, and may yet have to be res- 
cued by somebody from the vegetarians and 
teetotallers. The strange army passed and 



The Age of the Puritans 209 

vanished almost like a Moslem invasion; but 
it had made the difference that armed valour 
and victory always make, if it was but a nega- 
tive difference. It was the final break in our 
history; it was a breaker of many things, and 
perhaps of popular rebellion in our land. It 
is something of a verbal symbol that these men 
founded New England in America, for indeed 
they tried to found it here. By a paradox, 
there was something prehistoric in the very 
nakedness of their novelty. Even the old and 
savage things they invoked became more sav- 
age in becoming more new. In observing what 
is called their Jewish Sabbath, they would have 
had to stone the strictest Jew. And they (and 
indeed their age generally) turned witch-burn- 
ing from an episode to an epidemic. The de- 
stroyers and the things destroyed disappeared 
together ; but they remain as something nobler 
than the nibbling legalism of some of the Whig 
cynics who continued their work. They were 
above all things anti-historic, like the Futurists 
in Italy; and there was this unconscious great- 
ness about them that their very sacrilege was 
public and solemn like a sacrament; and they 
were ritualists even as iconoclasts. It was, 
properly considered, but a very secondary ex- 
ample of their strange and violent simplicity 
that one of them, before a mighty mob at 



210 A Short History of England 

Whitehall, cut off the anointed head of the sac- 
ramental man of the Middle Ages. For an- 
other, far away in the western shires, cut down 
the thorn of Glastonbury, from which Jiad 
grown the whole story of Britain. 



XIV— T/i^ Triumph of the Whigs 



WHETHER or no we believe that 
the Reformation really reformed, 
there can be little doubt that the 
Restoration did not really restore. 
Charles II. was never in the old sense a king; 
he was a Leader of the Opposition to his own 
Ministers. Because he was a clever politician 
he kept his official post, and because his brother 
and successor was an incredibly stupid politi- 
cian, he lost it ; but the throne was already only 
one of the official posts. In some ways, indeed, 
Charles 11. was fitted for the more modern 
world then beginning; he was rather an eigh- 
teenth-century than a seventeenth-century man. 
He was as witty as a character in a comedy; 
and it was already the comedy of Sheridan and 
not of Shakespeare. He was more modern yet 
when he enjoyed the pure experimentalism of 
the Royal Society, and bent eagerly over the 
toys that were to grow into the terrible engines 
of science. He and his brother, however, had 
two links with what was in England the losing 
side ; and by the strain on these their dynastic 
cause was lost, The first, which lessened in 

SIX 



212 A Short History/ of England 

its practical pressure as time passed, was, of 
course, the hatred felt for their religion. The 
second, which grew as it neared the next cen- 
tury, was their tie with the French Monarchy. 
We will deal with the religious quarrel before 
passing on to a much more irreligious age ; but 
the truth about it is tangled and far from easy 
to trace. 

The Tudors had begun to persecute the old 
religion before they had ceased to belong to it. 
That is one of the transitional complexities that 
can only be conveyed by such contradictions. 
A person of the type and time of Elizabeth 
would feel fundamentally, and even fiercely, 
that priests should be celibate, while racking 
and rending anybody caught talking to the only 
celibate priests. This mystery, which may be 
very variously explained, covered the Church 
of England, and in a great degree the people 
of England. Whether it be called the Catholic 
continuity of Anglicanism or merely the slow 
extirpation of Catholicism, there can be no 
doubt that a parson like Herrick, for instance, 
as late as the Civil War, was stuffed with ^'su- 
perstitions'' which were Catholic in the extreme 
sense we should now call Continental. Yet 
many similar parsons had already a parallel 
and opposite passion, and thought of Continen- 
tal Catholicism not even as the errant Church 



The Triumph of the Whigs 213 



of Christ, but as the consistent Church of An- 
tichrist. It is, therefore, very hard now to 
guess the proportion of Protestanism ; but there 
is no doubt about its presence, especially its 
presence in centres of importance like London. 
By the time of Charles II., after the purge of 
the Puritan Terror, it had become something 
at least more inherent and human than the 
mere exclusiveness of Calvinist creeds or the 
craft of Tudor nobles. The Monmouth rebel- 
lion showed that it had a popular, though an 
insufficiently popular, backing. The "No 
Popery'' force became the crowd if it never 
became the people. It was, perhaps, increas- 
ingly an urban crowd, and was subject to those 
epidemics of detailed delusion with which sen- 
sational journalism plays on the urban crowds 
of to-day. One of these scares and scoops 
(not to add the less technical name of lies) was 
the Popish Plot, a storm weathered warily by 
Charles II. Another w^as the Tale of the 
Warming Pan, or the bogus heir to the throne, 
a storm that finally swept away James II. 

The last blow, however, could hardly have 
fallen but for one of those illogical but almost 
lovable localisms to which the English tempera- 
ment is prone. The debate about the Church 
of England, then and now, differs from most 
debates in one vital point. It is not a debate 



214 A Short History of England 

about what an institution ought to do, or 
whether that institution ought to alter, but 
about what that institution actually is. One 
party, then as now, only cared for it because 
it was Catholic, and the other only cared for it 
because it was Protestant. Now, something 
had certainly happened to the English quite in- 
conceivable to the Scotch or the Irish. Masses 
of common people loved the Church of England 
without having even decided what it was. It 
had a hold different indeed from that of the 
mediaeval Church, but also very different from 
the barren prestige of gentility which clung to 
it in the succeeding century. Macaulay, with 
a widely different purpose in mind, devotes 
some pages to proving that an Anglican clergy- 
man was socially a mere upper servant in the 
seventeenth century. He is probably right; 
but he does not guess that this was but the de- 
generate continuity of the more democratic 
priesthood of the Middle Ages. A priest was 
not treated as a gentleman ; but a peasant was 
treated as a priest. And in England then, as 
in Europe now, many entertained the fancy 
that priesthood was a higher thing than gen- 
tility. In short, the national church was then 
at least really national, in a fashion that was 
emotionally vivid though intellectually vague. 
When, therefore, James II. seemed to menace 



The Triumph of the Whigs 215 

this practising communion, he aroused some- 
thing" at least more popular than the mere prig- 
gishness of the Whig lords. To this must be 
added a fact generally forgotten. I mean the 
fact that the influence then called Popish was 
then in a real sense regarded as revolutionary. 
The Jesuit seemed to the English not merely a 
conspirator but a sort of anarchist. There is 
something appalling about abstract speculations 
to many Englishmen ; and the abstract specula- 
tions of Jesuits like Suarez dealt with extreme 
democracy and things undreamed of here. The 
last Stuart proposals for toleration seemed 
thus to many as vast and empty as atheism. 
The only seventeenth-century Englishmen who 
had something of this transcendental abstrac- 
tion were the Quakers; and the cosy English 
compromise shuddered when the two things 
shook hands. For it was something much 
more than a Stuart intrigue which made these 
philosophical extremes meet, merely because 
they were philosophical, and which brought the 
weary but humorous mind of Charles II. into 
alliance with the subtle and detached spirit of 
William Penn. 

Much of England, then, was really alarmed 
at the Stuart scheme of toleration, sincere or 
insincere, because it seemed theoretical and 
therefore fanciful. It was in advance of its 



216 A Short History of England 

age or (to use a more intelligent language) too 
thin and ethereal for its atmosphere. And to 
this affection for the actual in the English mod- 
erates must be added (in what proportion we 
know not) a persecuting hatred of Popery al- 
most maniacal but quite sincere. The State 
had long, as we have seen, been turned to an 
engine of torture against priests and the 
friends of priests. Men talk of the Revocation 
of the Edict of Nantes ; but the English perse- 
cutors never had so tolerant an edict to revoke. 
But at least by this time the English, like the 
French, persecutors were oppressing a minor- 
ity. Unfortunately there was another prov- 
ince of government in which they were still 
more madly persecuting the majority. For it 
was here that came to its climax and took on 
its terrific character that lingering crime that 
was called the government of Ireland. It 
would take too long to detail the close network 
of unnatural laws by which that country was 
covered till towards the end of the eighteenth 
century ; it is enough to say here that the whole 
attitude to the Irish was tragically typified, and 
tied up with our expulsion of the Stuarts, in 
one of those acts that are remembered for ever. 
James IL, fleeing from the opinion of London 
if not of England, eventually found refuge in 
Ireland, which took arms in his favour. The 



The Triumph of the Whigs 217 

Prince of Orange, whom the aristocracy had 
summoned to the throne, landed in that country 
with an English and Dutch army, won the Bat- 
tle of the Boyne, but saw his army successfully 
arrested before Limerick by the military genius 
of Patrick Sarsfield. The check was so com- 
plete that peace could only be restored by prom- 
ising complete religious liberty to the Irish, in 
return for the surrender of Limerick. The 
new English Government occupied the town 
and immediately broke the promise. It is not 
a matter on which there is much more to be 
said. It was a tragic necessity that the Irish 
should remember it ; but it was far more tragic 
that the English forgot it. For he who has 
forgotten his sin is repeating it incessantly for 
ever. 

But here again the Stuart position was 
much more vulnerable on the side of secular 
policy, and especially of foreign policy. The 
aristocrats to whom power passed finally at the 
Revolution were already ceasing to have any 
supernatural faith in Protestantism as against 
Catholicism ; but they had a very natural faith 
in England as against France; and even, in a 
certain sense, in English institutions as against 
French institutions. And just as these men, 
the most unmediaeval of mankind, could yet 
boast about some mediaeval liberties, Magna 



218 A Short History of England 

Charta, the Parliament and the Jury, so they 
could appeal to a true mediaeval legend in the 
matter of a war with France. A typical eigh- 
teenth-century oligarch like Horace Walpole 
could complain that the cicerone in an old 
church troubled him with traces of an irrele- 
vant person named St. Peter, when he was 
looking for the remains of John of Gaunt. He 
could say it with all the naivete of scepticism, 
and never dream how far away from John of 
Gaunt he was really wandering in saying so. 
But though their notion of mediaeval history 
was a mere masquerade ball, it was one in 
which men fighting the French could still, in 
an ornamental way, put on the armour of the 
Black Prince or the crown of Henry of Mon- 
mouth. In this matter, in short, it is probable 
enough that the aristocrats were popular as 
patriots will always be popular. It is true that 
the last Stuarts were themselves far from un- 
patriotic ; and James II. in particular may well 
be called the founder of the British Navy. But 
their sympathies were with France, among 
other foreign countries; they took refuge in 
France, the elder before and the younger after 
his period of rule; and France aided the later 
Jacobite efforts to restore their line. And for 
the new England, especially the new English 
nobility, France was the enemy. 



The Triumph of the Whigs 219 

The transformation through which the ex- 
ternal relations of England passed at the end of 
the seventeenth century is symbolized by two 
very separate and definite steps; the first the 
accession of a Dutch king and the second the 
accession of a German king. In the first were 
present all the features that can partially make 
an unnatural thing natural. In the second we 
have the condition in which even those efifect- 
ing it can hardly call it natural, but only call it 
necessary. William of Orange was like a gun 
dragged into the breach of a wall; a foreign 
gun indeed, and one fired in a quarrel more for- 
eign than English, but still a quarrel in which 
the English, and especially the English aristo- 
crats, could play a great part. George of Han- 
over was simply something stuffed into a hole 
in the wall by English aristocrats, who prac- 
tically admitted that they were simply stopping 
it with rubbish. In many ways William, cyn- 
ical as he was, carried on the legend of the 
greater and grimmer Puritanism. He was in 
private conviction a Calvinist; and nobody 
knew or cared what George was except that he 
was not a Catholic. He was at home the partly 
republican magistrate of what had once been a 
purely republican experiment, and among the 
cleaner if colder ideals of the seventeenth cen- 
tury. George was when he was at home pretty 



220 'A Short History of England 

much what the King of the Cannibal Islands 
was when he was at home — a savage personal 
ruler scarcely logical enough to be called a 
despot. William was a man of acute if narrow 
intelligence; George was a man of no intelli- 
gence. Above all, touching the immediate ef- 
fect produced, William was married to a 
Stuart, and ascended the throne hand-in-hand 
with a Stuart; he was a familiar figure, and 
already a part of our royal family. With 
George there entered England something that 
had scarcely been seen there before ; something 
never mentioned in mediaeval or Renascence 
writing, except as one mentions a Hottentot — 
the barbarian from beyond the Rhine. 

The reign of Queen Anne, which covers the 
period between these two foreign kings, is 
therefore the true time of transition. It is the 
bridge between the time when the aristocrats 
were at least weak enough to call in a strong 
man to help them, and the time when they were 
strong enough deliberately to call in a weak 
man who would allow them to help themselves. 
To symbolize is always to simplify, and to sim- 
plify too much; but the whole may be well sym- 
bolized as the struggle of two great figures, 
both gentlemen and men of genius, both cou- 
rageous and clear about their own aims, and in 
everything else a violent contrast at every point. 



The Triumph of the Whigs 221 

One of them was Henry St. John, Lord Boling- 
broke; the other was John Churchill, the fa- 
mous and infamous Duke of Marlborough. 
The story of Churchill is primarily the story 
of the Revolution and how it succeeded; the 
story of Bolingbroke is the story of the Coun- 
ter-Revolution and how it failed. 

Churchill is a type of the extraordinary time 
in this, that he combines the presence of glory 
with the absence of honour. When the new 
aristocracy had become normal to the nation, 
in the next few generations, it produced per- 
sonal types not only of aristocracy but of chiv- 
alry. The Revolution reduced us to a country 
wholly governed by gentlemen; the popular 
universities and schools of the Middle Ages, 
like their guilds and abbeys, had been seized 
and turned into what they are — factories of 
gentlemen, when they are not merely factories 
of snobs. It is hard now to realise that what 
we call the Public Schools were once undoubt- 
edly public. By the Revolution they were al- 
ready becoming as private as they are now. 
But at least in the eighteenth century there 
were great gentlemen in the generous, perhaps 
too generous, sense now given to the title. 
Types not merely honest, but rash and romantic 
in their honesty, remain in the record with the 
pames of Nelson or of Fox, We have already 



222 A Short History of England 

seen that the later reformers defaced from 
fanaticism the churches which the first reform- 
ers had defaced simply from avarice. Rather 
in the same way the eighteenth-century Whigs 
often praised, in a spirit of pure magnanimity, 
what the seventeenth-century Whigs had done 
in a spirit of pure meanness. How mean was 
that meanness can only be estimated by realis- 
ing that a great military hero had not even 
the ordinary military virtues of loyalty to his 
flag or obedience to his superior officers, that 
he picked his way through campaigns that have 
made him immortal with the watchful spirit of 
a thieving camp-follower. When William 
landed at Torbay on the invitation of the other 
Whig nobles, Churchill, as if to add something 
ideal to his imitation of Iscariot, went to James 
with wanton professions of love and loyalty, led 
James's army forth as if to defend the country 
from invasion, and then calmly handed the 
army over to the invader. To the finish of this 
work of art but few could aspire, but in their 
degree all the politicians of the Revolution 
were upon this ethical pattern. While they 
surrounded the throne of James, there was 
scarcely one of them who was not in correspon- 
dence with William. When they afterwards 
surrounded the throne of William, there was 
not one of them who was not still in correspon-* 



The Triumph of the Whigs 223 

dence with James. It was such men who de- 
feated Irish Jacobitism by the treason of Lim- 
erick; it was such men who defeated Scotch 
Jacobitism by the treason of Glencoe. 

Thus the strange yet splendid story of eigh- 
teenth-century England is one of greatness 
founded on smallness, a pyramid standing on 
a point. Or, to vary the metaphor, the new 
mercantile oligarchy might be symbolised even 
in the externals of its great sister, the mercan- 
tile oligarchy of Venice. The solidity was all 
in the superstructure; the fluctuation had been 
all in the foundations. The great temple of 
Chatham and Warren Hastings was reared in 
its origins on things as unstable as water and 
as fugitive as foam. It is only a fancy, of 
course, to connect the unstable element with 
something restless and even shifty in the lords 
of the sea. But there was certainly in the 
genesis, if not in the later generations of our 
mercantile aristocracy, a thing only too mercan- 
tile; something which had also been urged 
against a yet older example of that polity, 
something called Piinica fides. The great 
Royalist Strafford, going disillusioned to 
death, had said, 'Tut not your trust in princes." 
The great Royalist Bolingbroke may well be 
said to have retorted, ''And least of all in mer- 
chant princes." 



224 A Short History of England 

Bolingbroke stands for a whole body of con- 
viction which bulked very big in English his- 
tory, but which with the recent winding of the 
course of history has gone out of sight. Yet 
without grasping it we cannot understand our 
past, nor, I will add, our future. Curiously 
enough, the best English books of the eigh- 
teenth century are crammed with it, yet mod- 
ern culture cannot see it when it is there. Dr. 
Johnson is full of it; it is what he meant when 
he denounced minority rule in Ireland, as well 
as when he said that the devil was the first 
Whig. Goldsmith is full of it; it is the whole 
point of that fine poem, ''The Deserted Vil- 
lage," and is set out theoretically with great 
lucidity and spirit in ''The Vicar of Wake- 
field." Swift is full of it; and found in it an 
intellectual brotherhood-in-arms with Boling- 
broke himself. In the time of Queen Anne it 
was probably the opinion of the majority of 
people in England. But it was not only in Ire- 
land that the minority had begun to rule. 

This conviction, as brilliantly expounded 
by Bolingbroke, had many aspects ; perhaps the 
most practical was the point that one of the 
virtues of a despot is distance. It is "the little 
tyrant of the fields" that poisons human life. 
T'^e thesis involved the truism that a good king 
is not only a good thing, but perhaps the best 



The Triumph of the Whigs 225 

thing. But it also involved the paradox that 
even a bad king is a good king, for his oppres- 
sion weakens the nobility and relieves the pres- 
sure on the populace. If he is a tyrant he 
chiefly tortures the torturers; and though 
Nero's murder of his own mother was hardly 
perhaps a gain to his soul, it was no great loss 
to his empire. Bolingbroke had thus a wholly 
rationalistic theory of Jacobitism. He was, in 
other respects, a fine and typical eighteenth- 
century intellect, a free-thinking Deist, a clear 
and classic writer of English. But he was also 
a man of adventurous spirit and splendid politi- 
cal courage, and he made one last throw for the 
Stuarts. It was defeated by the great Whig 
nobles who formed the committee of the new 
regime of the gentry. And considering who 
it was who defeated it, it is almost unnecessary 
to say that it was defeated by a trick. 

The small German prince ascended the 
throne, or rather was hoisted into it like a 
dummy, and the great English Royalist went 
into exile. Twenty years afterwards he reap- 
pears and reasserts his living and logical faith 
in a popular monarchy. But it is typical of the 
whole detachment and distinction of his mind 
that for this abstract ideal he was willing to 
strengthen the heir of the king whom he had 
tried to exclude. He was always a Royalist, 



226 A Short History of England 

but never a Jacobite. What he cared for was 
not a royal family, but a royal office. He cele- 
brated it in his great book "The Patriot King/' 
written in exile; and when he thought that 
George's great-grandson was enough of a pa- 
triot, he only wished that he might be more of 
a king. He made in his old age yet another at- 
tempt, with such unpromising instruments as 
George HI. and Lord Bute; and when these 
broke in his hand he died with all the dignity of 
the sed victa Catoni, The great commercial 
aristocracy grew on to its full stature. But if 
we wish to realise the good and ill of its 
growth, there is no better summary than this 
section from the first to the last of the foiled 
coups d'etat of Bolingbroke. In the first his 
policy made peace with France, and broke the 
connection with Austria. In the second his 
policy again made peace with France, and broke 
the connection with Prussia. For in that in- 
terval the seed of the money-lending squires of 
Brandenburg had waxed mighty, and had al- 
ready become that prodigy which has become so 
enormous a problem in Europe. By the end 
of this epoch Chatham, who incarnated and 
even created, at least in a representative sense, 
all that we call the British Empire, was at the 
height of his own and his country's glory. He 
summarised the new England of the Revolu- 



The Triumph of the Whigs 227 

tion in everything, especially in everything in 
which that movement seems to many to be in- 
trinsically contradictory and yet was most cor- 
porately consistent. Thus he was a Whig, and 
even in some ways what we should call a Lib- 
eral, like his son after him; but he was also an 
Imperialist and what we should call a Jingo; 
and the Whig party was consistently the Jingo 
party. He was an aristocrat, in the sense that 
all our public men were then aristocrats; but 
he w^as very emphatically what may be called 
a commercialist — one might almost say Cartha- 
ginian. In this connection he has the charac- 
teristic which perhaps humanised but was not 
allowed to hamper the aristocratic plan ; I mean 
that he could use the middle classes. It was a 
young soldier of middle rank, James Wolfe, 
who fell gloriously driving the French out of 
Quebec; it was a young clerk of the East India 
Company, Robert Clive, who threw open to the 
English the golden gates of India. But it was 
precisely one of the strong points of this eigh- 
teenth-century aristocracy that it wielded with- 
out friction the wealthier bourgeoisie; it was 
not there that the social cleavage was to come. 
He was an eloquent parliamentary orator, and 
though Parliament was as narrow as a senate, 
it was one of great senators. The very word 
recalls the roll of those noble Roman phrases 



228 A Short History of England 

they often used, which we are right in calling 
classic, but wrong in calling cold. In some 
ways nothing could be further from all this fine 
if florid scholarship, all this princely and patri- 
cian geniality, all this air of freedom and ad- 
venture on the sea, than the little inland state 
of the stingy drill-sergeants of Potsdam, ham- 
mering mere savages into mere soldiers. And 
yet the great chief of these was in some ways 
like a shadow of Chatham flung across the 
world — the sort of shadow that is at once an 
enlargement and a caricature. The English 
lords, whose paganism was ennobled by patriot- 
ism, saw here something drawn out long and 
thin out of their own theories. What was 
paganism in Chatham was atheism in Freder- 
ick the Great. And what was in the first 
patriotism was in the second something with no 
name but Prussianism. The cannibal theory 
of a commonwealth, that it can of its nature eat 
other commonwealths, had entered Christen- 
dom. Its autocracy and our own aristocracy 
drew indirectly nearer together, and seemed 
for a time to be wedded; but not before the 
great Bolingbroke had made a dying gesture, as 
if to forbid the banns. 



^Y—The War With the Great Republics 



WE cannot understand the eighteenth 
century so long as we suppose that 
rhetoric is artificial because it is 
artistic. We do not fall into this 
folly about any of the other arts. We talk of a 
man picking out notes arranged in ivory on a 
wooden piano ''with much feeling," or of his 
pouring out his soul by scraping on cat-gut 
after a training as careful as an acrobat's. 
But we are still haunted with a prejudice that 
verbal form and verbal effect must somehow 
be hypocritical when they are the link between 
things so living as a man and a mob. We 
doubt the feeling of the old-fashioned orator, 
because his periods are so rounded and pointed 
as to convey his feeling. Now, before any 
criticism of the eighteenth-century worthies 
must be put the proviso of their perfect artistic 
sincerity. Their oratory was unrhymed po- 
etry, and it had the humanity of poetry. It 
was not even unmetrical poetry; that century 
is full of great phrases, often spoken on the 
spur of great moments, which have in them 
the throb and recurrence of song, as of a man 

229 



230 A Short History of England 

thinking to a tune. Nelson's 'In honour I 
gained them, in honour I will die with them/' 
has more rhythm than much that is called vers 
litres. Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or 
give me death" might be a great line in Walt 
Whitman. 

It is one of the many quaint perversities of 
the English to pretend to be bad speakers ; but 
in fact the most English eighteenth-century 
epoch blazed with brilliant speakers. There 
may have been finer writing in France; there 
was no such fine speaking as in England. The 
Parliament had faults enough, but it was sin- 
cere enough to be rhetorical. The Parliament 
was corrupt, as it is now ; though the examples 
of corruption were then often really made ex- 
amples, in the sense of warnings, where they 
are now examples only in the sense of patterns. 
The Parliament was indifferent to the constitu- 
encies, as it is now; though perhaps the con- 
stituencies were less indifferent to the Parlia- 
ment. The Parliament was snobbish, as it is 
now, though perhaps more respectful to mere 
rank and less to mere wealth. But the Parlia- 
ment was a Parliament; it did fulfil its name 
and duty by talking, and trying to talk well ; it 
did not merely do things because they do not 
bear talking about — as it does now. It was 
then, to the eternal glory of our country, a 



War With the Great Republics 231 

great *'talking-shop/' not a mere buying and 
selling shop for financial tips and official places. 
And as with any other artist, the care the eigh- 
teenth-century man expended on oratory is a 
proof of his sincerity, not a disproof of it. An 
enthusiastic eulogium by Burke is as rich and 
elaborate as a lover's sonnet; but it is because 
Burke is really enthusiastic, like the lover. An 
angry sentence by Junius is as carefully com- 
pounded as a Renascence poison; but it is be- 
cause Junius is really angry — like the poisoner. 
Now, nobody who has realised this psychologi- 
cal truth can doubt for a moment that many of 
the English aristocrats of the eighteenth cen- 
tury had a real enthusiasm for liberty; their 
voices lift like trumpets upon the very word. 
Whatever their immediate forbears may have 
meant, these men meant what they said when 
they talked of the high memory of Hampden or 
the majesty of Magna Charta. Those patriots 
whom Walpole called the Boys included many 
who really were patriots — or better still, who 
really were boys. If we prefer to put it so, 
among the Whig aristocrats were many who 
really were Whigs ; Whigs by all the ideal defi- 
nitions which identified the party with a de- 
fence of law against tyrants and courtiers. But 
if anybody deduces, from the fact that the 
Whig aristocrats were Whigs, any doubt about 



232 A Short History of England 

whether the Whig aristocrats were aristocrats, 
there is one practical test and reply. It might 
be tested in many ways : by the game laws and 
enclosure laws they passed, or by the strict 
code of the duel and the definition of honour 
on which they all insisted. But if it be really 
questioned whether I am right in calling their 
whole world an aristocracy, and the very re- 
verse of it a democracy, the true historical test 
is this : that when republicanism really entered 
the world, they instantly waged two great wars 
with it — or (if the view be preferred) it in- 
stantly waged two great wars with them. 
America and France revealed the real nature of 
the English Parliament. Ice may sparkle, but 
a real spark will show it is only ice. So when 
the red fire of the Revolution touched the 
frosty splendours of the Whigs, there was in- 
stantly a hissing and a strife; a strife of the 
flame to melt the ice, of the water to quench 
the flame. 

It has been noted that one of the virtues of 
the aristocrats was liberty, especially liberty 
among themselves. It might even be said that 
one of the virtues of the aristocrats was cyn- 
icism. They were not stuffed with our fash- 
ionable fiction, with its stiff and wooden fig- 
ures of a good man named Washington and a 
bad man named Boney. They at least were 



War With the Great Republics 233 

aware that Washington's cause was not so ob- 
viously white nor Napoleon's so obviously 
black as most books in general circulation 
would indicate. They had a natural admira- 
tion for the military genius of Washington 
and Napoleon ; they had the most unmixed con- 
tempt for the German Royal Family. But 
they were, as a class, not only against both 
Washington and Napoleon, but against them 
both for the same reason. And it was that 
they both stood for democracy. 

Great injustice is done to the English aris- 
tocratic government of the time through a fail- 
ure to realise this fundamental difference, es- 
pecially in the case of America. There is a 
wrong-headed humour about the English which 
appears especially in this, that while they often 
(as in the case of Ireland) make themselves 
out right where they were entirely wrong, they 
are easily persuaded (as in the case of Amer- 
ica) to make themselves out entirely wrong 
where there is at least a case for their having 
been more or less right. George III.'s Gov- 
ernment laid certain taxes on the colonial com- 
munity on the eastern seaboard of America. 
It was certainly not self-evident, in the sense 
of law and precedent, that the Imperial Gov- 
ernment could not lay taxes on such colonists. 
Nor were the taxes themselves of that practi- 



234 A Short History of England ^ 

cally oppressive sort which rightly raise every- 
where the common casuistry of revolution. 
The Whig oligarchs had their faults, but utter 
lack of sympathy with liberty, especially local 
liberty, and with their adventurous kindred 
beyond the seas, was by no means one of their 
faults. Chatham, the great chief of the new 
and very national noblesse, was typical of them 
in being free from the faintest illiberality and 
irritation against the colonies as such. He 
would have made them free and even favoured 
colonies, if only he could have kept them as col- 
onies. Burke, who was then the eloquent voice 
of Whiggism, and was destined later to show 
how wholly it was a voice of aristocracy, went 
of course even further. Even North com- 
promised; and though George III., being a fool, 
might himself have refused to compromise, he 
had already failed to effect the Bolingbroke 
scheme of the restitution of the royal power. 
The case for the Americans, the real reason for 
calling them right in the quarrel, was some- 
thing much deeper than the quarrel. They 
were at issue, not with a dead monarchy, but 
with a living aristocracy ; they declared war on 
something much finer and more formidable 
than poor old George. Nevertheless, the popu- 
lar tradition, especially in America, has pic- 
tured it primarily as a duel of George III. and 



War With the Great Republics 235 



George Washington; and, as we have noticed 
more than once, such pictures though figura- 
tive are seldom false. King George's head 
was not much more useful on the throne than 
it was on the sign-board of a tavern; neverthe- 
less the sign-board was really a sign, and a 
sign of the times. It stood for a tavern that 
sold not English but German beer. It stood 
for that side of the Whig policy which Chat- 
ham showed when he was tolerant to America 
alone, but intolerant of America when allied 
with France. That very wooden sign stood, in 
short, for the same thing as the juncture with 
Frederick the Great; it stood for that Anglo- 
German alliance which, at a very much later 
time in history, was to turn into the world-old 
Teutonic Race. 

Roughly and frankly speaking, we may say 
that America forced the quarrel. She wished 
to be separate, which was to her but another 
phrase for wishing to be free. She was not 
thinking of her wrongs as a colony, but already 
of her rights as a republic. The negative ef- 
fect of so small a difference could never have 
changed the world, without the positive effect 
of a great ideal, one may say of a great new re- 
ligion. The real case for the colonists is that 
they felt they could be som.ethlng, which they 
also felt, and justly, that England would never 



236 "A Short History of England 

help them to be. England would probably have 
allowed the colonists all sorts of concessions 
and constitutional privileges; but England 
could not allow the colonists equality : I do not 
mean equality with her, but even with each 
other. Chatham might have compromised 
with Washington, because Washington was a 
gentleman; but Chatham could hardly have 
conceived a country not governed by gentle- 
men. Burke was apparently ready to grant 
everything to America ; but he would not have 
been ready to grant what America eventually 
gained. If he had seen American democracy, 
he would have been as much appalled by it as 
he was by French democracy, and would al- 
ways have been by any democracy. In a word_, 
the Whigs were liberal and even generous aris- 
tocrats, but they were aristocrats ; that is why 
their concessions were as vain as their con- 
quests. We talk, with a humiliation too rare 
with us, about our dubious part in the secession 
of America. Whether it increase or decrease 
the humiliation I do not know; but I strongly 
suspect that we had very little to do with it. I 
believe we counted for uncommonly little in the 
case. We did not really drive away the Amer- 
ican colonists, nor were they driven. They 
were led on by a light that went before. 

That light came from France, like the armies 



War With the Great Republics 237 

of Lafayette that came to the help of Washing- 
ton. France was already in travail with the 
tremendous spiritual revolution which was 
soon to reshape the world. Her doctrine, dis- 
ruptive and creative, was widely misunderstood 
at the time, and is much misunderstood still, 
despite the splendid clarity of style in which it 
was stated by Rousseau in the ''Contrat So- 
cial," and by Jefferson in *'The Declaration of 
Independence.'' Say the very word ^'equality'' 
in many modern countries, and four hundred 
fools will leap to their feet at once to explain 
that some men can be found, on careful exam- 
ination, to be taller or handsomer than others. 
As if Danton had not noticed that he was taller 
than Robespierre, or as if Washington was not 
well aware that he was handsomer than Frank- 
lin. This is no place to expound a philosophy ; 
it will be enough to say in passing, by way of a 
parable, that when we say that all pennies are 
equal, we do not mean that they all look exactly 
the same. We mean that they are absolutely 
equal in their one absolute character, in the 
most important thing about them. It may be 
put practically by saying that they are coins 
of a certain value, twelve of which go to a 
shilling. It may be put symbolically, and even 
mystically, by saying that they all bear the im- 
^ge of the King. And, though the most mys- 



238 A Short History of England 

tical, it is also the most practical summary of 
equality that all men bear the image of the 
King of Kings. Indeed, it is of course true 
that this idea had long underlain all Chris- 
tianity, even in institutions less popular in form 
than were, for instance, the mob of mediaeval 
republics in Italy. A dogma of equal duties 
implies that of equal rights. I know of no 
Christian authority that would not admit that 
it is as wicked to murder a poor man as a rich 
man, or as bad to burgle an inelegantly fur- 
nished house as a tastefully furnished one. 
But the world had wandered further and fur- 
ther from these truisms, and nobody in the 
world was further from them than the group 
of the great English aristocrats. The idea of 
equality of men is in substance simply the idea 
of the importance of man. But it was pre- 
cisely the notion of the importance of a mere 
man which seemed startling and indecent to a 
society whose whole romance and religion now 
consisted of the importance of a gentleman. 
It was as if a man had walked naked into Par- 
liament. There is not space here to develop 
the moral issue in full, but this will suffice to 
show that the critics concerned about the dif- 
ference in human types or talents are consider- 
ably wasting their time. If they can under- 
stand how two coins can count the same though 



War With the Great Republics 239 

one is bright and the other brown, they might 
perhaps understand how two men can vote the 
same though one is bright and the other dull. 
If, however, they are still satisfied with their 
solid objection that some men are dull, I can 
only gravely agree with them, that some men 
are very dull. 

But a few years after Lafayette had returned 
from helping to found a republic in America he 
was flung over his own frontiers for resisting 
the foundation of a republic in France. So 
furious was the onward stride of this new spirit 
that the republican of the new world lived to 
be the reactionary of the old. For when France 
passed from theory to practice, the question 
was put to the world in a way not thinkable in 
connection with the prefatory experiment of a 
thin population on a colonial coast. The 
mightiest of human monarchies, like some 
monstrous immeasurable idol of iron, was 
melted down in a furnace barely bigger than 
itself, and recast in a size equally colossal, but 
in a shape men could not understand. Many, 
at least, could not understand it, and least of all 
the liberal aristocracy of England. There 
were, of course, practical reasons for a con- 
tinuous foreign policy against France, wheth- 
er royal or republican. There was primarily 
the desire to keep any foreigner from men- 



240 A Short History of England I 

acing us from the Flemish coast; there was, 
to a much lesser extent, the colonial rivalry 
in which so much English glory had been 
gained by the statesmanship of Chatham and 
the arms of Wolfe and of Clive. The for- 
mer reason has returned on us with a singular 
irony; for in order to keep the French out of 
Flanders we flung ourselves with increasing 
enthusiasm into a fraternity with the Germans. 
We purposely fed and pampered the power 
which was destined in the future to devour 
Belgium as France would never have devoured 
it, and threaten us across the sea with terrors 
of which no Frenchman would ever dream. 
But indeed much deeper things unified our atti- 
tude towards France before and after the Rev- 
olution. It is but one stride from despotism 
to democracy, in logic as well as in history; 
and oligarchy is equally remote from both. 
The Bastille fell, and it seemed to an English- 
man merely that a despot had turned into a 
demos. The young Bonaparte rose, and it 
seemed to an Englishman merely that a demos 
had once more turned into a despot. He was 
not wrong in thinking these allotropic forms 
of the same alien thing; and that thing was 
equality. For when millions are equally sub- 
ject to one law, it makes little difference if they 
are also subject to one lawgiver: the general 



War With the Great Republics 241 

social life is a level. The one thing that the 
English have never understood about Napo- 
leon, in all their myriad studies of his mysteri- 
ous personality, is how impersonal he was. I 
had almost said how unimportant he was. He 
said himself, "I shall go down to history with 
my code in my hand;" but in practical effects, 
as distinct from mere name and renown, it 
Avould be even truer to say that his code will 
go down to history with his hand set to it in 
signature — somew^hat illegibly. Thus his tes- 
tamentary law has broken up big estates and 
encouraged contented peasants in places where 
his name is cursed, in places where his name is 
almost unknown. In his lifetime, of course, it 
was natural that the annihilating splendour of 
his military strokes should rivet the eye like 
flashes of lightning; but his rain fell more si- 
lently, and its refreshment remained. It is 
needless to repeat here that after bursting one 
world-coalition after another by battles that 
are the masterpieces of the military art, he was 
finally worn down by two comparatively popu- 
lar causes, the resistance of Russia and the re- 
sistance of Spain. The former was largely, 
like so much that is Russian, religious ; but in 
the latter appeared most conspicuously that 
which concerns us here, the valour, vigilance 
and high national spirit of England in the eigh- 



242 A Short History of England 

teenth century. The long Spanish Campaign 
tried and made triumphant the great Irish sol- 
dier, afterwards known as Wellington; who 
has become all the more symbolic since he was 
finally confronted with Napoleon in the last 
defeat of the latter at Waterloo. Wellington, 
though too logical to be at all English, was in 
many ways typical of the aristocracy; he had 
irony and independence of mind. But if we 
wish to realise how rigidly such men remained 
limited by their class, how little they really 
knew what was happening in their time, it is 
enough to note that Wellington seems to have 
thought he had dismissed Napoleon by saying 
he was not really a gentleman. If an acute 
and experienced Chinaman were to say of 
Chinese Gordon, ''He is not actually a Man- 
darin," we should think that the Chinese sys- 
tem deserved its reputation for being both rigid 
and remote. 

But the very name of Wellington is enough 
to suggest another, and with it the reminder 
that this, though true, is inadequate. There 
was some truth in the idea that the English- 
man was never so English as when he was out- 
side England, and never smacked so much of 
the soil as when he was on the sea. There has 
run through the national psychology something 
that has never had a name except the eccentric 



War With the Great Republics 243 

and indeed extraordinary name of Robinson 
Crusoe ; which is all the more English for being 
quite undiscoverable in England. It may be 
doubted if a French or German boy especially 
wishes that his cornland or vineland were a 
desert; but many an English boy has wished 
that his island were a desert island. But we 
might even say that the Englishman was too 
insular for an island. He awoke most to life 
when his island was sundered from the founda- 
tions of the world, when it hung like a planet 
and flew like a bird. And, by a contradiction, 
the real British army was in the navy; the bold- 
est of the islanders were scattered over the 
moving archipelago of a great fleet. There 
still lay on it, like an increasing light, the leg- 
end of the Armada; it was a great fleet full of 
the glory of having once been a small one. 
Long before Wellington ever saw Waterloo the 
ships had done their work, and shattered the 
French navy in the Spanish seas, leaving like 
a light upon the sea the life and death of Nel- 
son, who died with his stars on his bosom and 
his heart upon his sleeve. There is no word 
for the memory of Nelson except to call him 
mythical. The very hour of his death, the very 
name of his ship, are touched with that epic 
completeness which critics call the long arm of 
coincidence and prophets the hand of God. 



244 A Short History of England 

His very faults and failures were heroic, not 
in a loose but in a classic sense ; in that he fell 
only like the legendary heroes, weakened by 
a woman, not foiled by any foe among men. 
And he remains the incarnation of a spirit in 
the English that is purely poetic ; so poetic that 
it fancies itself a thousand things, and some- 
times even fancies itself prosaic. At a recent 
date, in an age of reason, in a country already 
calling itself dull and business-like, with top- 
hats and factory chimneys already beginning 
to rise like towers of funereal efficiency, this 
country clergyman's son moved to the last in 
a luminous cloud, and acted a fairy tale. He 
shall remain as a lesson to those who do not 
understand England, and a mystery to those 
who think they do. In outward action he led 
his ships to victory and died upon a foreign 
sea; but symbolically he established something 
indescribable and intimate, something that 
sounds like a native proverb; he was the man 
who burnt his ships, and who for ever set the 
Thames on fire. 



XVI — Aristocracy and the Disconterits 



1>T IS the pathos of many hackneyed things 
that they are intrinsically delicate and 
are only mechanically made dull. Any 
one who has seen the first white light, 
when It comes in by a window, knows that day- 
light is not only as beautiful but as mysterious 
as moonlight. It is the subtlety of the colour 
of sunshine that seems to be colourless. So 
patriotism, and especially English patriotism, 
which is vulgarised with volumes of verbal 
fog and gas, is still in itself something as 
tenuous and tender as a climate. The name 
of Nelson, with which the last chapter ended, 
might very well summarise the matter; for 
his name is banged and beaten about like an 
old tin can, while his soul had something in 
it of a fine and fragile eighteenth-century vase. 
And it will be found that the most threadbare 
things contemporary and connected with him 
have a real truth to the tone and meaning of 
his life and time, though for us they have too 
often degenerated into dead jokes. The ex- 
pression ''hearts of oak,'' for instance, is no un- 
happy phrase for the finer side of that England 

245 



246 A Short History of England 

of which he was the best expression. Even as 
a material metaphor it covers much of what I 
mean; oak was by no means only made into 
bludgeons, nor even only into battle-ships ; and 
the English gentry did not think it business- 
like to pretend to be mere brutes. The mere 
name of oak calls back like a dream those dark 
but genial interiors of colleges and country 
houses, in which great gentlemen, not degen- 
erate, almost made Latin an English language 
and port an English wine. Some part of that 
world at least will not perish ; for its autumnal 
glow passed into the brush of the great English 
portrait-painters, who, more than any other 
men, were given the power to commemorate 
the large humanity of their own land; immor- 
talising a mood as broad and soft as their own 
brush-work. Come naturally, at the right emo- 
tional angle, upon a canvas of Gainsborough, 
who painted ladies like landscapes, as great and 
as unconscious with repose, and you will note 
how subtly the artist gives to a dress flowing 
in the foreground something of the divine 
quality of distance. Then you will understand 
another faded phrase and words spoken far 
away upon the sea; there will rise up quite 
fresh before you and be borne upon a bar of 
music, like words you have never heard before: 
'Tor England, home, and beauty." 



Aristocracy and the Discontents 247 

When I think of these things, I have no 
temptation to mere grumbling at the great gen- 
try that waged the great war of our fathers. 
But indeed the difficulty about it was something 
much deeper than could be dealt with by any 
grumbling. It was an exclusive class, but not 
an exclusive life; it was interested in all 
things, though not for all men. Or rather 
those things it failed to include, through the 
limitations of this rationalist interval between 
mediaeval and modern mysticism, were at least 
not of the sort to shock us with superficial in- 
humanity. The greatest gap in their souls, for 
those who think it a gap, was their complete 
and complacent paganism. All their very de- 
cencies assumed that the old faith was dead; 
those who held it still, like the great Johnson, 
were considered eccentrics. 

The French Revolution was a riot that 
broke up the very formal funeral of Chris- 
tianity; and was followed by various other 
complications, including the corpse coming to 
life. But the scepticism was no mere oligar- 
chic orgy; it was not confined to the Hell-Fire 
Club, which might in virtue of its vivid name 
be regarded as relatively orthodox. It is pres- 
ent in the mildest middle-class atmosphere; as 
in the middle-class masterpiece about *'North- 
anger Abbev," where we actually remember it 



248 A Short History of England 

is an antiquity, without ever remembering it is 
an abbey. Indeed there is no clearer case of 
it than what can only be called the atheism of 
Jane Austen. 

Unfortunately it could truly be said of the 
English gentleman, as of another gallant and 
gracious individual, that his honour stood 
rooted in dishonour. He was, indeed, some- 
what in the position of such an aristocrat in a 
romance, whose splendour has the dark spot of 
a secret and a sort of blackmail. There was, 
to begin with, an uncomfortable paradox in the 
tale of his pedigree. Many heroes have 
claimed to be descended from the gods, from 
beings greater than themselves; but he him- 
self was far more heroic than his ancestors. 
His glory did not come from the Crusades but 
from the Great Pillage. His fathers had not 
come over with William the Conqueror, but 
only assisted, in a somewhat shuffling manner, 
at the coming over of William of Orange. His 
own exploits were often really romantic, in the 
cities of the Indian sultans or the war of the 
wooden ships; it was the exploits of the far-off 
founders of his family that were painfully real- 
istic. In this the great gentry were more in 
the position of Napoleonic marshals than of 
Norman knights, but their position was worse ; 
for the marshals might be descended from 



Aristocracy and the Discontents 249 

peasants and shop-keepers; but the oHgarchs 
were descended from usurers and thieves. 
That, for good or evil, was the paradox of Eng- 
land; the typical aristocrat was the typical up- 
start. 

But the secret was worse; not only was 
such a family founded on stealing, but the fam- 
ily was stealing still. It is a grim truth that all 
through the eighteenth century, all through the 
great Whig speeches about liberty, all through 
the great Tory speeches about patriotism, 
through the period of Wandewash and Plassy, 
through the period of Trafalgar and Waterloo, 
one process was steadily going on in the central 
senate of the nation. Parliament was passing 
bill after bill for the enclosure, by the great 
landlords, of such of the common lands as had 
survived out of the great communal system of 
the Middle Ages. It is much more than a pun, 
it is the prime political irony of our history, 
that the Commons were destroying the com- 
mons. The very word "common," as we have 
before noted, lost its great moral meaning, and 
became a mere topographical term for some 
remaining scrap of scrub or heath that was not 
worth stealing. In the eighteenth century 
these last and lingering commons were con- 
nected only with stories about highwaymen, 
which still Hnger in our literature. The ro- 



250 A Short History of England 

mance of them was a romance of robbers, but 
not of the real robbers. 

This was the mysterious sin of the English 
squires, that they remained human, and yet 
ruined humanity all around them. Their own 
ideal, nay their own reality of life, was really 
more generous and genial than the stiff sav- 
agery of Puritan captains and Prussian no- 
bles; but the land withered under their smile 
as under an alien frown. Being still at least 
English, they were still in their way good- 
natured; but their position was false, and a 
false position forces the good-natured into bru- 
tality. The French Revolution was the chal- 
lenge that really revealed to the Whigs that 
they must make up their minds to be really 
democrats or admit that they were really aris- 
tocrats. They decided, as in the case of their 
philosophic exponent Burke, to be really aris- 
tocrats; and the result was the White Terror, 
the period of anti- Jacobin repression which re- 
vealed the real side of their sympathies more 
than any stricken fields in foreign lands. Cob- 
bett, the last and greatest of the yeomen, of 
the small farming class which the great estates 
were devouring daily, was thrown into prison 
merely for protesting against the flogging of 
English soldiers by German mercenaries. In 
that savage dispersal of a peaceful meeting 



Aristocracy and the Discontents 251 



which was called the Massacre of Peterloo, 
English soldiers were indeed employed, though 
much more in the spirit of German ones. And 
it is one of the bitter satires that cling to the 
very continuity of our history, that such sup- 
pression of the old yeoman spirit was the work 
of soldiers who still bore the title of the Yeo- 
manry. 

The name of Cobbett is very important here; 
indeed it is generally ignored because it is im- 
portant. Cobbett was the one man who saw 
the tendency of the time as a whole, and 
challenged it as a whole; consequently he 
went without support. It is a mark of our 
whole modern history that the masses are 
kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet 
by the fight because it is a sham fight; thus 
most of us know by this time that the Party 
System has been popular only in the same 
sense that a football match is popular. The 
division in Cobbett's time was slightly more sin- 
cere, but almost as superficial; it was a differ- 
ence of sentiment about externals which di- 
vided the old agricultural gentry of the eigh- 
teenth century from the new mercantile gen- 
try of the nineteenth. Through the first half 
of the nineteenth century there were some real 
disputes between the squire and the merchant. 
The merchant became converted to the impor-, 



252 y. Short History of England 

tant economic thesis of Free Trade, and ac- 
cused the squire of starving the poor by dear 
bread to keep up his agrarian privilege. Later 
the squire retorted not ineffectively by accus- 
ing the merchant of brutalising the poor by 
overworking them in his factories to keep up 
his commercial success. The passing of the 
Factory Acts was a confession of the cruelty 
that underlay the new industrial experiments, 
just as the Repeal of the Corn Laws was a con- 
fession of the comparative weakness and un- 
popularity of the squires, who had destroyed 
the last remnants of any peasantry that might 
have defended the field against the factory. 
These relatively real disputes would bring us 
to the middle of the Victorian era. But long 
before the beginning of the Victorian era, Cob- 
bett had seen and said that the disputes were 
only relatively real. Or rather he would have 
said, in his more robust fashion, that they were 
not real at all. He would have said that the 
agricultural pot and the industrial kettle were 
calling each other black, when they had both 
been blackened in the same kitchen. And he 
would have been substantially right; for the 
great industrial disciple of the kettle, James 
Watt (who learnt from it the lesson of the 
steam engine), was typical of the age in this, 
that he found the old Trade Guilds too fallen, 



Aristocracy and the Discontents 253 



unfashionable and out of touch with the times 
to help his discovery, so that he had recourse 
to the rich minority which had warred on and 
weakened those Guilds since the Reformation. 
There was no prosperous peasant's pot, such 
as Henry of Navarre invoked, to enter into al- 
liance with the kettle. In other words, there 
was in the strict sense of the word no common- 
wealth, because wealth, though more and more 
wealthy, was less and less common. Whether 
it be a credit or discredit, industrial science and 
enterprise were in bulk a new experiment of 
the old oligarchy; and the old oligarchy had 
always been ready for new experiments — be- 
ginning w4th the Reformation. And it is 
characteristic of the clear mind which was hid- 
den from many by the hot temper of Cobbett, 
that he did see the Reformation as the root of 
both squirearchy and industrialism, and called 
on the people to break away from both. The 
people made more effort to do so than is com- 
monly realised. There are many silences in 
our somewhat snobbish history; and when the 
educated class can easily suppress a revolt, they 
can still more easily suppress the record of it. 
It was so with some of the chief features of that 
great mediaeval revolution the failure of which, 
or rather the betrayal of which, was the real 
turning-point of our history. It was so with 



254* A Short History of England 

thie revolts against the religious policy of 
Henry VIII. ; and it was so with the rick-burn- 
ing and frame-breaking riots of Cobbett's 
epoch. The real mob reappeared for a mo- 
ment in our history for just long enough to 
show one of the immortal marks of the real 
mob — ritualism. There is nothing that strikes 
the undemocratic doctrinaire so sharply about 
direct democratic action as the vanity or mum- 
mery of the things done seriously in the day- 
light; they astonish him by being as unprac- 
tical as a poem or a prayer. The French Revo- 
lutionists stormed an empty prison merely be- 
cause it was large and solid and difficult to 
storm, and therefore symbolic of the mighty 
monarchical machinery of which it had been 
but the shed. The English rioters laboriously 
broke in pieces a parish grindstone, merely be- 
cause it was large and solid and difficult to 
break, and therefore symbolic of the mighty 
oligarchical machinery which perpetually 
ground the faces of the poor. They also put 
the oppressive agent of some landlord in a cart 
and escorted him round the county, merely to 
exhibit his horrible personality to heaven and 
earth. Afterwards they let him go, which 
marks perhaps, for good or evil, a certain na- 
tional modification of the movement. There is 
something very typical of an English revolu« 



Aiistocracy and the Discontents 255 

tion in having the tumbril without the guillo- 
tine. 

Anyhow, these embers of the revolutionary 
epoch were trodden out very brutally; the 
grindstone continued (and continues) to grind 
in the scriptural fashion above referred to, and, 
in most political crises since, it is the crowd 
that has found itself in the cart. But, of 
course, both the riot and repression in England 
were but shadows of the awful revolt and ven- 
geance which crowned the parallel process in 
Ireland. Here the terrorism, which was but 
a temporary and desperate tool of the aristo- 
crats in England (not being, to do them jus- 
tice, at all consonant to, their temperament, 
which had neither the cruelty and morbidity 
nor the logic and fixity of terrorism), became 
in a more spiritual atmosphere a flaming sword 
of religious and racial insanity. Pitt, the son 
of Chatham, was quite unfit to fill his father's 
place, unfit indeed (I cannot but think) to fill 
the place commonly given him in history. But 
if he was wholly w^orthy of his immortality, his 
Irish expedients, even if considered as immedi- 
ately defensible, have not been worthy of their 
immortality. He was sincerely convinced of 
the national need to raise coalition after coali- 
tion against Napoleon, by pouring the commer- 
cial wealth then rather peculiar to England 



256 ji Short History of England 

upon her poorer Allies, and he did this with 
indubitable talent and pertinacity. He was at 
the same time faced with a hostile Irish rebel- 
lion and a partly or potentially hostile Irish 
Parliament. He broke the latter by the most 
indecent bribery and the former by the most 
indecent brutality, but he may well have 
thought himself entitled to tlie tyrant's plea. 
But not only were his expedients those of panic, 
or at any rate of peril, but (what is less clearly 
realised) it is the only real defence of them 
that they were those of panic and peril. He 
was ready to emancipate Catholics as such, for 
religious bigotr}^ was not the vice of the oli- 
garchy, but he was not ready to emancipate 
Irishmen as such. He did not really want to 
enlist Ireland like a recruit, but simply to dis- 
arm Ireland like an enemy. Hence his settle- 
ment was from the first in a false position for 
settling anything. The Union may have been 
a necessity, but the Union was not a Union. 
It was not intended to be one, and nobody has 
ever treated it as one. We have not only never 
succeeded in making Ireland English, as Bur- 
gundy has been made French, but we have 
never tried. Burgundy could boast of Ra- 
cine, though Racine was a Norman, but we 
should smile if Ireland boasted of Shakespeare. 
Our vanity has involved us in a mere contradic- 



Aristocracy and the Discontents 257 

tion; we have tried to combine identification 
with superiority. It is simply weak-minded to 
sneer at an Irishman if he figures as an Eng- 
lishman, and rail at him if he figures as an 
Irishman. So the Union has never even ap- 
plied English laws to Ireland, but only coer- 
cions and concessions both specially designed 
for Ireland. From Pitt's time to our own this 
tottering alternation has continued, from the 
time when the great O'Connell, with his mon- 
ster meetings, forced our Government to listen 
to Catholic Emancipation to the time when 
the great Parnell, with his obstruction, forced 
it to listen to Home Rule, our staggering equi- 
librium has been maintained by blows from 
without. In the later nineteenth century the 
better sort of special treatment began on the 
whole to increase. Gladstone, an idealistic 
though inconsistent Liberal, rather belatedly 
realised that the freedom he loved in Greece 
and Italy had its rights nearer home, and may 
be said to have found a second youth in the 
gateway of the grave, in the eloquence and 
emphasis of his conversion. And a statesman 
wearing the opposite label (for what that is 
worth) had the spiritual insight to see that 
Ireland, if resolved to be a nation, was even 
more resolved to be a peasantry. George 
Wyndham, generous, imaginative, a man 



258 A Short History of England 

among politicians, insisted that the agrarian 
agony of evictions, shootings, and rack-rent- 
ings should end with the individual Irish get- 
ting, as Parnell had put it, a grip on their 
farms. In more ways than one his work 
rounds off almost romantically the tragedy of 
the rebellion against Pitt, for Wyndham him- 
self was of the blood of the leader of the 
rebels, and he wrought the only reparation yet 
made for all the blood, shamefully shed, that 
flowed around the fall of FitzGerald. 

The effect on England was less tragic; in- 
deed, in a sense it was comic. Wellington, 
himself an Irishman, though of the narrower 
party, was preeminently a realist, and, like 
many Irishmen, was especially a realist about 
Englishmen. He said the army he com- 
manded was the scum of the earth; and the 
remark is none the less valuable because that 
army proved itself useful enough to be called 
the salt of the earth. But in truth it was in 
this something of a national symbol and the 
guardian, as it were, of a national secret. 
There is a paradox about the English, even as 
distinct from the Irish or the Scotch, which 
makes any formal version of their plans and 
principles inevitably unjust to them. England 
not only makes her ramparts out of rubbish, 
but she finds ramparts in what she has herself 



Aristocracy and the Discontents 259 

cast away as rubbish. If it be a tribute to a 
thing to say that even its failures have been 
successes, there is truth in that tribute. Some 
of the best colonies were convict settlements, 
and might be called abandoned convict settle- 
ments. The army was largely an army of 
gaol-birds, raised by gaol-delivery; but it was 
a good army of bad men; nay, it was a gay 
army of unfortunate men. This is the colour 
and the character that has run through the 
realities of English history, and it can hardly 
be put in a book, least of all a historical book. 
It has its flashes in our fantastic fiction and in 
the songs of the street, but its true medium is 
conversation. It has no name but incongru- 
ity. An illogical laughter survives every- 
thing in the English soul. It survived, per- 
haps, with only too much patience, the time of 
terrorism in which the more serious Irish rose 
in revolt. That time was full of a quite top- 
sy-turvy tyranny, and the English humourist 
stood on his head to suit it. Indeed, he often 
receives a quite irrational sentence in a police 
court by saying he will do it on his head. So, 
under Pitt's coercionist regime, a man was 
sent to prison for saying that George IV. was 
fat, but we feel he must have been partly sus- 
tained in prison by the artistic contemplation 
of how fat he was. That sort of liberty, that 



260 A Short History of England 

sort of humanity, and it is no mean sort, did 
indeed survive all the drift and downward 
eddy of an evil economic system, as well as the 
dragooning of a reactionary epoch and the 
drearier menace of materialistic social science, 
as embodied in the new Puritans, who have 
purified themselves even of religion. Under 
this long process, the worst that can be said 
is that the English humourist has been slowly 
driven downwards in the social scale. Fal- 
staff was a knight, Sam Weller was a gentle- 
man's servant, and some of our recent restric- 
tions seem designed to drive Sam Weller to the 
status of the Artful Dodger. But well it was 
for us that some such trampled tradition and 
dark memory of Merry England survived; 
well for us, as we shall see, that all our social 
science failed and all our statesmanship broke 
down before it. For there was to come the 
noise of a trumpet and a dreadful day of visi- 
tation, in which all the daily workers of a dull 
civilisation were to be called out of their houses 
and their holes like a resurrection of the dead, 
and left naked under a strange sun with no 
religion but a sense of humour. And men 
might know of what nation Shakespeare was, 
who broke into puns and practical jokes in the 
darkest passion of his tragedies, if they had 
only heard those boys in France and Flanders 



Aristocracy and the Discontents 261 



who called out ''Early Doors!" themselves in 
a theatrical memory, as they went so early 
in their youth to break down the doors of 
death. 



XVII — The Return of the Barbarian 

THE only way to write a popular 
history, as we have already re- 
marked, would be to write it back- 
wards. It would be to take com- 
mon objects of our own street and tell the tale 
of how each of them came to be in the street 
at all. And for my immediate purpose it is 
really convenient to take two objects we have 
known all our lives, as features of fashion or 
respectability. One, which has grown rarer 
recently, is what we call a top-hat; the other, 
which is still a customary formality, is a pair 
of trousers. The history of these humorous 
objects really does give a clue to what has hap- 
pened in England for the last hundred years. 
It is not necessary to be an aesthete in order 
to regard both objects as the reverse of beau- 
tiful, as tested by what may be called the ra- 
tional side of beauty. The lines of human 
limbs can be beautiful, and so can the lines of 
loose drapery, but not cylinders too loose to 
be the first and too tight to be the second. 
Nor is a subtle sense of harmony needed to 
see that while there are hundreds of differ- 

262 



The Return of the Barbarian 263 

ently proportioned hats, a hat that actually 
grows larger towards the top is somewhat top- 
heavy. But what is largely forgotten is this, 
that these two fantastic objects, which now 
strike the eye as unconscious freaks, were orig- 
inally conscious freaks. Our ancestors, to 
do them justice, did not think them casual or 
commonplace; they thought them, if not ridicu- 
lous, at least rococo. The top-hat was the 
topmost point of a riot of Regency dandyism, 
and bucks w^ore trousers while business men 
were still wearing knee-breeches. It will not 
be fanciful to see a certain oriental touch in 
trousers, which the later Romans also regarded 
as effeminately oriental; it was an oriental 
touch found in many florid things of the time 
— in Byron's poems or Brighton Pavilion. 
Now, the interesting point is that for a whole 
serious century these instantaneous phantasies 
have remained like fossils. In the carnival of 
the Regency a few fools got into fancy dress, 
and we have all remained in fancy dress. At 
least, we have remained in the dress, though 
we have lost the fancy. 

I say this is typical of the most important 
thing that happened in the Victorian time. For 
the most important thing was that nothing 
happened. The very fuss that was made about 
minor modifications brings into relief the rigid- 



264 A Short History of England 

ity with which the main lines of social life were 
left as they were at the French Revolution. 
We talk of the French Revolution as something 
that changed the world ; but its most important 
relation to England is that it did not change 
England. A student of our history is con- 
cerned rather with the effect it did not have 
than the effect it did. If it be a splendid fate 
to have survived the Flood, the English oli- 
garchy had that added splendour. But even 
for the countries in which the Revolution was 
a convulsion, it was the last convulsion — until 
that which shakes the world to-day. It gave 
their character to all the commonwealths, 
which all talked about progress, and were occu- 
pied in marking time. Frenchmen, under all 
superficial reactions, remained republican in 
spirit, as they had been when they first wore 
top-hats. Englishmen, under all superficial 
reforms, remained oligarchical in spirit, as 
they had been when they first wore trousers. 
Only one power might be said to be growing, 
and that in a plodding and prosaic fashion — 
the power in the North-East whose name was 
Prussia. And the English were more and 
more learning that this growth need cause 
them no alarm, since the North Germans were 
their cousins in blood and their brothers in 
spirit. 



The Return of the Barbarian 265 

The first thing to note, then, about the nine- 
teenth century is that Europe remained herself 
as compared with the Europe of the great war, 
and that England especially remained herself 
as compared even with the rest of Europe. 
Granted this, we may give their proper impor- 
tance to the cautious internal changes in this 
country, the small conscious and the large un- 
conscious changes. Most of the conscious 
ones were much upon the model of an early 
one, the great Reform Bill of 1832, and can 
be considered in the light of it. First, from 
the standpoint of most real reformers, the 
chief thins: about the Reform Bill was that it 
did not reform. It had a huge tide of popular 
enthusiasm behind it, which wholly disap- 
peared when the people found themselves in 
front of it. It enfranchised large masses of 
the middle classes; it disfranchised very defi- 
nite bodies of the working classes; and it so 
struck the balance between the conservative 
and the dangerous elements in the common- 
wealth that the governing class was much 
stronger than before. The date, however, is 
important, not at all because it was the begin- 
ning of democracy, but because it was the be- 
ginning of the best way ever discovered of 
evading and postponing democracy. Here en- 
ters the homoeopathic treatment of revolution, 



266 A Short History/ of England 

since so often successful. Well into the next 
generation Disraeli, the brilliant Jewish adven- 
turer who was the symbol of the English aris- 
tocracy being no longer genuine, extended the 
franchise to the artisans, partly, indeed, as a 
party move against his great rival, Gladstone, 
but more as the method by which the old popu- 
lar pressure was first tired out and then toned 
down. The politicians said the working-class 
was now strong enough to be allowed votes. 
It would be truer to say it was now weak 
enough to be allowed votes. So in more recent 
times Payment of Members, which would once 
have been regarded (and resisted) as an inrush 
of popular forces, was passed quietly and with- 
out resistance, and regarded merely as an 
extension of parliamentary privileges. The 
truth is that the old parliamentary oligarchy 
abandoned their first line of trenches because 
they had by that time constructed a second line 
of defence. It consisted in the concentration 
of colossal political funds in the private and 
irresponsible power of the politicians, col- 
lected by the sale of peerages and more im- 
portant things, and expended on the jerryman- 
dering of the enormously expensive elections. 
In the presence of this inner obstacle a vote 
became about as valuable as a railway ticket 
when there is a permanent block on the line. 



The Return of the Barbarian 267 

The fagade and outward form of this new 
secret government is the merely mechanical 
application of what is called the Party System. 
The Party System does not consist, as some 
suppose, of two parties, but of one. If there 
were two real parties, there could be no system. 
But if this was the evolution of parliamen- 
tary reform, as represented by the first Reform 
Bill, we can see the other side of it in the social 
reform attacked immediately after the first 
Reform Bill. It is a truth that should be a 
tower and a landmark, that one of the first 
things done by the Reform Parliament was to 
establish those harsh and dehumanised work- 
houses which both honest Radicals and honest 
Tories branded with the black title of the New 
Bastille. This bitter name lingers in our lit- 
erature, and can be found by the curious in the 
works of Carlyle and Hood, but it is doubtless 
interesting rather as a note of contemporary 
indignation than as a correct comparison. It 
is easy to imagine the logicians and the legal 
orators of the parliamentary school of prog- 
ress finding many points of differentiation 
and even of contrast. The Bastille was one 
central institution; the workhouses have been 
many, and have everywhere transformed local 
life with whatever they have to give of social 
sympathy and inspiration. Men of high rank 



268 A Short History of England 

and great wealth were frequently sent to the 
Bastille, but no such mistake has ever been 
made by the more business administration of 
the workhouse. Over the most capricious op- 
erations of the Lettres de Cachets there still 
hovered some hazy traditional idea that a man 
is put in prison to punish him for something. 
It was a discovery of a later social science that 
men who cannot be punished can still be im- 
prisoned. But the deepest and most decisive 
difference lies in the better fortune of the New 
Bastille, for no mob has ever dared to storm it, 
and it never fell. 

The new Poor Law was indeed not wholly 
new in the sense that it was the culmination 
and clear enunciation of a principle foreshad- 
owed in the earlier Poor Law of Elizabeth, 
which was one of the many anti-popular effects 
of the Great Pillage. When the monasteries 
were swept away and the mediaeval system of 
hospitality destroyed, tramps and beggars be- 
came a problem, the solution of which has al- 
ways tended towards slavery, even when the 
question of slavery has been cleared of the ir- 
relevant question of cruelty. It is obvious 
that a desperate man might find Mr. Bumble 
and the Board of Guardians less cruel than 
cold weather and the bare ground — even if he 
were allowed to sleep on the ground, which (by 



The Return of the Barbarian 269 

a veritable nightmare of nonsense and injus- 
tice) he is not. He is actually punished for 
sleeping under a bush on the specific and stated 
ground that he cannot afford a bed. It is ob- 
vious, however, that he may find his best physi- 
cal good by going into the workhouse, as he 
often found it in pagan times by selling himself 
into slavery. The point is that the solution 
remains servile, even when Mr. Bumble and 
the Board of Guardians ceased to be in com- 
mon sense cruel. The pagan might have the 
luck to sell himself to a kind master. The 
principle of the new Poor Law, which has so 
far proved permanent in our society, is that 
the man lost all his civic rights and lost them 
solely through poverty. There is a touch of 
irony, though hardly of mere hypocrisy, in the 
fact that the Parliament which effected this re- 
form had just been abolishing black slavery 
by buying out the slave-owners in the British 
colonies. The slave-owners were bought out 
at a price big enough to be called blackmail, but 
it would be misunderstanding the national 
mentality to deny the sincerity of the senti- 
ment. Wilberforce represented in this the 
real wave of Wesleyan religion which had 
made a humane reaction against Calvinism, 
and was in no mean sense philanthropic. But 
there is something romantic in the English 



270 A Short History of England 

mind which can always see what is remote. 
It is the strongest example of what men lose 
by being long-sighted. It is fair to say that 
they gain many things also, the poems that are 
like adventures and the adventures that are 
like poems. It is a national savour, and there- 
fore in itself neither good nor evil, and it de- 
pends on the application whether we find a 
scriptural text for it in the wish to take the 
wings of the morning and abide in the utter- 
most parts of the sea, or merely in the saying 
that the eyes of a fool are in the ends of the 
earth. 

Anyhow, the unconscious nineteenth-cen- 
tury movement, so slow that it seems station- 
ary, was altogether in this direction, of which 
workhouse philanthropy is the type. Never- 
theless, it had one national institution to com- 
bat and overcome; one institution all the more 
intensely national because it was not official, 
and in a sense not even political. The modern 
Trade Union was the inspiration and creation 
of the English; it is still largely known 
throughout Europe by its English name. It 
was the English expression of the European 
effort to resist the tendency of Capitalism to 
reach its natural culmination in slavery. In 
this it has an almost weird psychological in- 
terest, for it is a return to the past by men ig- 



The Return of the Barbarian 271 



norant of the past, like the subconscious action 
of some man who has lost his memory. We 
say that history repeats itself, and it is even 
more interesting when it unconsciously repeats 
itself. No man on earth is kept so ignorant of 
the Middle Ages as the British workman, ex- 
cept perhaps the British business man who em- 
ploys him, yet all who know even a little of the 
Middle Ages can see that the modern Trade 
Union is a groping for the ancient Guild. It 
is true that those who look to the Trade Union, 
and even those clear-sighted enough to call it 
the Guild, are often without the faintest tinge 
of mediaeval mysticism, or even of mediaeval 
morality. But this fact is itself the most strik- 
ing and even staggering tribute to mediaeval 
morality. It has all the clinching logic of coin- 
cidence. If large numbers of the most hard- 
headed atheists had evolved, out of their own 
inner consciousness, the notion that a number 
of bachelors or spinsters ought to live together 
in celibate groups for the good of the poor, or 
the observation of certain hours and offices, it 
would be a very strong point in favour of the 
monasteries. It would be all the stronger if 
the atheists had never heard of monasteries; it 
would be strongest of all if they hated the very 
name of monasteries. And it is all the 
stronger because the man who puts his trust in 



272 A Short History of England 

Trades Unions does not call himself a Catho- 
lic or even a Christian, if he does call himself a 
Guild Socialist. 

The Trade Union movement passed through 
many perils, including a ludicrous attempt of 
certain lawyers to condemn as a criminal con- 
spiracy that Trade Union solidarity of which 
their own profession is the strongest and most 
startling example in the world. The struggle 
culminated in gigantic strikes which split the 
country in ever^ direction in the earlier part of 
the twentieth century. But another process, 
with much more power at its back, was also in 
operation. The principle represented by the 
new Poor Law proceeded on its course, and 
in one important respect altered its course, 
though it can hardly be said to have altered 
its object. It can most correctly be stated by 
saying that the employers themselves, who al- 
ready organised business, began to organise 
social reform. It was more picturesquely ex- 
pressed by a cynical aristocrat in Parliament 
who said, 'We are all Socialists now." The 
Socialists, a body of completely sincere men 
led by several conspicuously brilliant men, had 
long hammered into their heads the hopeless 
sterility of mere non-interference in exchange. 
The Socialists proposed that the State should 
not merely interfere in business but should 



The Return of the Barbarian 273 



take over the business, and pay all men as 
equal wage-earners, or at any rate as wage- 
earners. The employers were not willing to 
surrender their own position to the State, and 
this project has largely faded from politics; 
but the wiser of them were willing to pay 
better wages, and they were specially willing 
to bestow various other benefits so long as they 
were bestowed after the manner of wages. 
Thus we had a series of social reforms which, 
for good or evil, all tended in the same direc- 
tion ; the permission to employees to claim cer- 
tain advantages as employees, and as some- 
thing permanently different from employers. 
Of these the obvious examples were Employ- 
ers' Liability, Old Age Pensions, and, as mark- 
ing another and more decisive stride in the 
process, the Insurance Act. 

The latter in particular, and the whole plan 
of the social reform in general, were modelled 
upon Germany. Indeed the whole English 
life of this period was overshadowed by Ger- 
many. We had now reached, for good or evil, 
the final fulfilment of that gathering influence 
which began to grow on us in the seventeenth 
century, which was solidified by the military 
alliances of the eighteenth century, and which 
in the nineteenth century had been turned into 
a philosophy — not to say a mythology. Ger- 



274 A Short History of England 

man metaphysics had thinned our theology, so 
that many a man's most solemn conviction 
about Good Friday was that Friday was named 
after Freya. German history had simply an- 
nexed English history, so that it was almost 
counted the duty of any patriotic Englishman 
to be proud of being a German. The genius 
of Carlyle, the culture preached by Matthew 
Arnold, would not, persuasive as they were, 
have alone produced this effect but for an ex- 
ternal phenomenon of great force. Our in- 
ternal policy was transformed by our foreign 
policy; and foreign policy was dominated by 
the more and more drastic steps which the 
Prussian, now clearly the prince of all the Ger- 
man tribes, was taking to extend the German 
influence in the world. Denmark was robbed 
of two provinces; France was robbed of two 
provinces; and though the fall of Paris was 
felt almost everywhere as the fall of the capital 
of civilisation, a thing like the sacking of 
Rome by the Goths, many of the most influen- 
tial people in England still saw nothing in it 
but the solid success of our kinsmen and old 
allies of Waterloo. The moral methods which 
achieved it, the juggling with the Augusten- 
burg claim, the forgery of the Ems telegram, 
were either successfully concealed or were but 
cloudily appreciated. The Higher Criticism 



TJie Return of the Barbarian 275 

had entered into our ethics as well as our the- 
ology. Our view of Europe was also distorted 
and made disproportionate by the accident of a 
natural concern for Constantinople and our 
route to India, which led Palmerston and later 
premiers to support the Turk and see Russia 
as the only enemy. This somewhat cynical 
reaction was summed up in the strange figure 
of Disraeli, who made a pro-Turkish settle- 
ment full of his native indifference to the 
Christian subjects of Turkey, and sealed it at 
Berlin in the presence of Bismarck. Disraeli 
was not without insight into the inconsistencies 
and illusions of the English ; he said many sa- 
gacious things about them, and one especially 
when he told the Manchester School that their 
motto was 'Teace and Plenty amid a starving 
people, and with the world in arms." But what 
he said about peace and plenty might well be 
parodied as a comment on what he himself 
said about Peace with Honour. Returning 
from that Berlin Conference he should have 
said, ''I bring you Peace with Honour ; peace 
with the seeds of the most horrible war of his- 
tory; and honour as the dupes and victims of 
the old bully in Berlin." 

But it was, as we have seen, especially in 
social reform that Germany was believed to be 
leading the way, and to have found the secret 



276 'A Short History of England 

of dealing with the economic evil. In the 
case of Insurance, which was the test case, she 
was applauded for obliging all her workmen to 
set apart a portion of their wages for any time 
of sickness; and numerous other provisions, 
both in Germany and England, pursued the 
same ideal, which was that of protecting the 
poor against themselves. It everywhere in- 
volved an external power having a finger in 
the family pie ; but little attention was paid to 
any friction thus caused, for all prejudices 
against the process were supposed to be the 
growth of ignorance. And that ignorance 
was already being attacked by what was called 
education — an enterprise also inspired largely 
by the example, and partly by the commercial 
competition of Germany. It was pointed out 
that in Germany governments and great em- 
ployers thought it well worth their while to 
apply the grandest scale of organization and 
the minutest inquisition of detail to the instruc- 
tion of the whole German race. The govern- 
ment was the stronger for training its scholars 
as it trained its soldiers; the big businesses 
were the stronger for manufacturing mind as 
they manufactured material. English educa- 
tion was made compulsory; it was made free; 
many good, earnest, and enthusiastic men la- 
boured to create a ladder of standards and ex- 



The Return of the Barbarian 277 

aminations, which would connect the cleverest 
of the poor with the culture of the English uni- 
versities and the current teaching in history 
or philosophy. But it cannot be said that the 
connection was very complete, or the achieve- 
ment so thorough as the German achievement. 
For whatever reason, the poor Englishman 
remained in many things much as his fathers 
had been, and seemed to think the Higher 
Criticism too high for him even to criticise. 

And then a day came, and if we were wise, 
we thanked God that we had failed. Educa- 
tion, if it had ever really been in question, 
would doubtless have been a noble gift; educa- 
tion in the sense of the central tradition of his- 
tory, with its freedom, its family honour, its 
chivalry which is the flower of Christendom. 
But what would our populace, in our epoch, 
have actually learned if they had learned all 
that our schools and universities had to teach ? 
That England was but a little branch on a 
large Teutonic tree; that an unfathomable 
spiritual sympathy, all-encircling like the sea, 
had always made us the natural allies of the 
great folk by the flowing Rhine ; that all light 
came from Luther and Lutheran Germany, 
whose science was still purging Christianity of 
its Greek and Roman accretions ; that Germany 
was a forest fated to grow ; that France was a 



278 A Short History of England 

dung-heap fated to decay — a dung-heap with 
a crowing cock on it. What would the ladder 
of education have led to, except a platform on 
which a posturing professor proved that a cou- 
sin german was the same as a German cousin ! 
What would the guttersnipe have learnt as a 
graduate, except to embrace a Saxon because 
he was the other half of an Anglo-Saxon? The 
day came, and the ignorant fellow found he 
had other things to learn. And he was quicker 
than his educated countrymen, for he had 
nothing to unlearn. 

He in whose honour all had been said and 
sung stirred, and stepped across the border of 
Belgium. Then were spread out before men's 
eyes all the beauties of his culture and all the 
benefits of his organization; then we beheld 
under a lifting daybreak what light we had fol- 
lowed and after what image we had laboured 
to refashion ourselves. Nor in any story of 
mankind has the irony of God chosen the fool- 
ish things so catastrophically to confound the 
wise. For the common crowd of poor and ig- 
norant Englishmen, because they only knew 
that they were Englishmen, burst through 
the filthy cobwebs of four hundred years and 
stood where their fathers stood when they 
knew that they were Christian men. The Eng- 
lish poor, broken in every revolt, bullied by 



The Return of the Barbarian 279 

every fashion, long despoiled of property, and 
now being despoiled of liberty, entered history 
with a noise of trumpets, and turned them- 
selves in two years into one of the iron armies 
of the world. And when the critic of politics 
and literature, feeling that this war is after 
all heroic, looks around him to find the hero, 
he can point to nothing but the mob. 



XVIII — ConcltLsion 



IN so small a book on so large a matter, 
finished hastily enough amid the neces- 
sities of an enormous national crisis, it 
would be absurd to pretend to have 
achieved proportion; but I will confess to some 
attempt to correct a disproportion. We talk 
of historical perspective, but I rather fancy 
there is too much perspective in history; for 
perspective makes a giant a pigmy and a pigmy 
a giant. The past is a giant foreshortened 
with his feet towards us; and sometimes the 
feet are of clay. We see too much merely the 
sunset of the Middle Ages, even when we ad- 
mire its colours; and the study of a man like 
Napoleon is too often that of "The Last 
Phase." So there is a spirit that thinks it 
reasonable to deal in detail with Old Sarum, 
and would think it ridiculous to deal in detail 
with the Use of Sarum; or which erects in 
Kensington Gardens a golden monument to 
Albert larger than anybody has ever erected 
to Alfred. English history is misread espe- 
cially, I think, because the crisis is missed. It 
is usually put about the period of the Stuarts; 

280 



Conclusion 281 



and many of the memorials of our past seem 
to suffer from the same visitation as the me- 
morial of Mr. Dick. But though the story of 
the Stuarts was a tragedy, I think it was also 
an epilogue. 

I make the guess, for it can be no more, that 
the change really came with the fall of Rich- 
ard II., following on his failure to use mediae- 
val despotism in the interests of mediaeval 
democracy. England, like the other nations 
of Christendom, had been created not so much 
by the death of the ancient civilisation as by 
its escape from death, or by its refusal to die. 
Mediaeval civilisation had arisen out of the re- 
sistance to the barbarians, to the naked bar- 
barism from the North and the more subtle 
barbarism from the East. It increased in lib- 
erties and local government under kings who 
controlled the wider things of war and taxa- 
tion; and in the present war of the fourteenth 
century in England, the king and the populace 
came for a moment into conscious alliance. 
They both found that a third thing was al- 
ready too strong for them. That third thing 
was the aristocracy ; and it captured and called 
itself the Parliament. The House of Com- 
mons, as its name implies, had primarily con- 
sisted of plain men summoned by the King like 
jurymen; but it soon became a very special 



282 A Short History of England 

jury. It became, for good or evil, a great or- 
gan of government, surviving the Church, the 
monarchy and the mob ; it did many great and 
not a few good things. It created what we 
call the British Empire; it created something 
which was really far more valuable, a new and 
natural sort of aristocracy, more humane and 
even humanitarian than most of the aristocra- 
cies of the world. It had sufficient sense of 
the instincts of the people, at least until lately, 
to respect the liberty and especially the laugh- 
ter that had become almost the religion of the 
race. But in doing all this, it deliberately did 
two other things, which it thought a natural 
part of its policy; it took the side of the Pro- 
testants, and then (partly as a consequence) 
it took the side of the Germans. Until very 
lately most intelligent Englishmen were quite 
honestly convinced that in both it was taking 
the side of progress against decay. The ques- 
tion which many of them are now inevitably 
asking themselves, and would ask whether I 
asked it or no, is whether it did not rather take 
the side of barbarism against civilisation. 

At least, if there be anything valid in my 
own vision of these things, we have returned 
to an origin and we are back in the war with 
the barbarians. It falls as naturally for me 
that the Englishman and the Frenchman 



Conclusion 283 



should be on the same side, as that Alfred and 
Abo should be on the same side, in that black 
century when the barbarians wasted Wessex 
and besieged Paris. But there are now, per- 
haps, less certain tests of the spiritual as dis- 
tinct from the material victory of civilisation. 
Ideas are more mixed, are complicated by fine 
shades or covered by fine names. And 
whether the retreating savage leaves behind 
him the soul of savagery, like a sickness in the 
air, I myself should judge primarily by one 
political and moral test. The soul of sav- 
agery is slavery. Under all its mask of ma- 
chinery and instruction, the German regimen- 
tation of the poor was the relapse of barbarians 
into slavery. I can see no escape from it for 
ourselves in the ruts of our present reforms, 
but only by doing what the medisevals did after 
the other barbarian defeat: beginning, by 
guilds and small independent groups, gradu- 
ally to restore the personal property of the 
poor and the personal freedom of the family. 
If the English really attempt that, the English 
have at least shown in the war, to any one who 
doubted it, that they have not lost the courage 
and capacity of their fathers, and can carry it 
through if they will. If they do not do so, 
if they continue to move only with the dead 
momentum of the social discipline w4iich we 



284} A Short History of England 

learnt from Germany, there is nothing before 
us but what Mr. Belloc, the discoverer of this 
great sociological drift, has called the Servile 
State. And there are moods in which a man, 
considering that conclusion of our story, is 
half inclined to wish that the wave of Teutonic 
barbarism had washed out us and our armies 
together; and that the world should never 
know anything more of the last of the English, 
except that they died for liberty. 



JTHEi ^ND 



THE CRIMES 
OF ENGLAND 

By GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 

i27no. Cloth. $1.00 net 



npHE crimes of England have consisted of her 
-■- failures to check the advance of Germany and to 
resist all invasions of German ideas. In his satiri- 
cal letter of introduction to a certain Professor 
Whirlwind, Mr. Chesterton offers a list of these 
offenses. ''On many occasions we have been very 
wrong indeed," he confesses. "We were very wrong 
indeed when we took part in preventing Europe 
from putting a term to the impious piracies of 
Frederick the Great. We were very wrong indeed 
when we allowed the triumph over Napoleon to be 
soiled with the mire and blood of Blucher's sullen 
savages. . . . We were very wrong indeed when 
we praised the soulless Prussian education and 
copied the soulless Prussian laws." Each of the 
"crimes" named is treated in a chapter. 

"Here we have Mr. Chesterton at his best." 

The Nation. 

"Mr. Chesterton has never written a cleverer or a more 
characteristic book. " — New York Evening Post. 

"All that has been said of Mr. Chesterton's satirically 
humorous style, his scintillating wit, his pungency of 
sarcasm, is justified by this book. " — Springfield Union. 

"The book is delicious reading for the pro-ally. And 
it is really a book of valuable historical essays. " 

Cleveland Plain Dealer. 



JOHN LANE COMPANY. NEW YORK 



By GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 

ORTHODOXY 

i2mo. Cloth. $1.50 net 

"A work of genius. ''—Chicago Evening Post. 

" 'Orthodoxy' is the most important religious work that 
has appeared since Emerson." — North American Review. 

"Mr. Chesterton was luminous; he has become incan- 
descent. He has become orthodox — and proves it in 
most heterodox fashion." — Chicago Tribune. 

"I have just read Chesterton's 'Orthodoxy* with the 
greatest delight. It is certainly the best book of his 
that I have ever read. Its remarkable brilliancy ought 
to do a great deal of good. " 

Wm. Lyon Phelps, Yale University. 



HERETICS 

i2mo. Cloth. $1.50 net 

"It is likely to produce a sensation. It is an extraor- 
dinary book and will be much read and talked about. 
It will come as a surprise to Mr. Chesterton's readers, 
since it shows him serious — beyond a doubt. But in 
becoming serious Mr. Chesterton has not ceased to be 
clever. His epigrams still pop and his paradoxes bewilder. 
In writing of serious things, he apparently sees no reason 
for being sad about them. " — N. Y. Globe. 



JOHN LANE COMPANY, NEW YORK 



^^ 'R o o K, oj^ Inspiration 



CARRY ON 

LETTERS IN WARTIME 

BY 

LIEUTENANT CONINGSBY DAWSON 

Author of 

••The Garden Without Walls," 

•'Slaves of Freedom," etc. 

Frontispiece, i2mo. Cloth, $i.oo net. 

"The bcx)k ranks beyond anything he has previously 
written in vividness of impression, reality, tenderness, 
sympathetic insight, and exquisite literary grace." 

Chicago Tribune. 

"It is a book which should be read by everyone in this 
country, for it breathes forth inspiration and courage, and 
fills us with faith in our cause and its ultimate success." 

Norfolk Ledger Dispatch. 

*'Coningsby Dawson has given us something better than 
a novel in his latest volume of letters, for his new book 
is one of the most interesting productions of the subjective 
side of the war that has yet appeared." 

St. Louis Democrat. 

"Perhaps the most striking thing about the letters is the 
spirit of buoyant determination from which the book 
derives its title — 'Carry On' — the phrase which has also 
become the slogan of those who have battled for nearly 
three years on the Western front in France." 

Philadelphia Press. 

"These letters were not intended for publication and 
are therefore intimate and affectionate and more self- 
revealing than they would otherwise have been, but they 
may be accepted as expressing the moral and spiritual 
temper of the hundreds of thousands of young men 
under arms." Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger. 



NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY 



The International Studio 

Universal Press Opinions of the Magazine 

New York Tribune : " The Studio is to-day, by all odds, the most 
artistic periodical printed in English." 

Boston Globe : " It is like walking through a select art gallery to 
look over the Studio, and like attending a course of first-class 
lectures to read it." 

Detroit Free Press : " A publication that the up-to-date art lover 
cannot do without." 

Washington Times: "This is the most beautiful of all magazines 
in pictorial embellishment and the extrinsics of superb book- 
making. 

Troy Times : " Has become famous for the beauty of its illustra- 
tions. It is simply invaluable." 

London Daily Chronicle: "The most successful art magazine in 
Europe." 

The Outlook (London) : " Shows an alertness to the needs of the 
present day art-lover that no similar publication in any way 
approaches." 

The Sketch (London) : " It would not be easy to have another 
art publication so distinguished for so many and so variously de- 
lightful qualities." 

The Globe : " No other periodical can be said to have a policy 
of the same kind, or to show such complete consistency in its advo- 
cacy of all aestheticism that is intelligent and progressive." 

Le Figaro (Paris) : " Le premier magazine artistique du monde." 

La Depiche de Toulouse : '* Le Studio compte \ peine cinq annees 
d'existence, mais ce temps lui a suffi pour operer une revolution 
veritable dans la presse artistique." 

UArt Moderne : " Bien ecrite, bien editee, d'un artistique aspect 
dans sa robe vert olive, le Studio est sans contredit la plus neuve et 
la plus originale revue d'art illustree qu'on puisse signaler. . . . 
Nulle autre revue d'art ne lui est comparable, ni en Angleterre ni 
surtout sur le continent." 

The Bombay Gazette : " The Studio easily takes first place among 
art magazines." 



i 



^%^v 









^ ^^K^^/\^ %, 









,x^'^- V¥ 



s^ ■ \^ 









.v-^yT^ 



1^ » -SnTn^ <^ O 






.0 d -.'^■ 



c^^ 



"oo^ 






^^ .V^^ 



^^ 






'j>. 




O ^f I . s <(J < . -^ o X 



,-x\ 






^A ^ 



,0 c 






■^4 






'^^ 



-^^ 






cr> .\' 



o » > 



.^ -71 



ci-. 






V',, ^'^^ 



t\^ 



^^A v^ 



'' c- 



.y 



"^^ <^^' 
.<^% 



V .',r 









<• <^ 



o o 

H r. 






^ .^ 



•x^ ^ 



Q> -^i 






i" . 



vC^ ''^^ 



ft y^ 






.-^" 



vOo 



V- 



S" 



V .,'^~- 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




020 946 199 7 



i\i 



a 



m 



m 

In 






Uin 



mmm 



inl'Mw 



